


In the Kitchen of the Soup God

by gooseberry



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Baratie Feels, Dubious Consent, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Rape/Non-con - Freeform, Unhealthy Relationships, Unsafe Sex, cursing, mafia, slight homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 04:19:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sanji looks up, woozy and feeling like he's about to throw up, he sees a pretty big guy looking back down at him. Kinda ugly, tattooed, and holding a tire iron.<br/>  <br/><i>Oh</i>, he thinks. That explains the wooziness.<br/> <br/>"Did you," he asks, swallowing back the vomit rising in his throat, "just hit me with a <i>tire iron</i>?"</p><p>---</p><p>In which Sanji is a college student with way too many clothes, Usopp is naive enough to fall in love, Gin is a pretty liberal mafia hitman, Zeff is emotionally constipated and very concerned, and everything seems to fall apart. It's pretty much all Baratie feels, and a lot of hurt with very little comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Kitchen of the Soup God

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags one more time. 
> 
> This fic is equal parts ridiculous and dark--a bit like life, I suppose? No one's very sympathetic, and while people care about each other, they also try to seriously harm each other. There's teasing and flirting and rape and casual discussion of murder, all in the same, uh, thirty-thousand words, so.
> 
> Yeah.
> 
> I don't know, it's a fic I wrote for a friend a couple years ago, and it's really all just Baratie feels, and Sanji-whumpage, and sexual tension going every which way.

When Sanji looks up, woozy and feeling like he's about to throw up, he sees a pretty big guy looking back down at him. Kinda ugly, tattooed, and holding a tire iron.  
    
 _Oh_ , he thinks. That explains the wooziness.  
   
"Did you," he asks, swallowing back the vomit rising in his throat, "just hit me with a _tire iron_?"

The guy just twirls the iron, a fast movement that makes Sanji feel even sicker, and lifts it up, like he’s going to beat Sanji's brains in.  
    
 _Well_ , Sanji thinks, and he kicks the guy in the nuts.  
    
The guy keels over, tire iron clattering onto the pavement. He's making a high-pitched whining sound, and Sanji would feel pretty bad for him, if he wasn't _bleeding out of the fucking skull_. Tire iron, _Jesus_.  
   
Sanji rolls over to his hands and knees and staggers upright. When he bends over to grab the tire iron, he has a moment of vertigo, and yeah, he's about to throw up any second now. He grabs the tire iron, wraps his hand around it as tight as he can, and the cold metal cuts through the dizziness just a little. He turns to the guy, and lifts up the tire iron, and kicks the guy in the shoulder, sending him over onto his side.

"What the fuck?" he asks, pleasantly enough he thinks, considering he just got waylaid in an alleyway by some _nutcase with tire iron_. He's not gonna be getting over this one any time soon.

The guy winces up at him, and Sanji waves the tire iron a little. The guy blanches, and keeps on holding onto his nuts, making little gasping sounds. Sanji kicks him in the shoulder again, and lifts the tire iron higher.  
   
"What." he repeats, "the fuck. Why the hell are you hitting me with a _fucking tire iron_ , you fucking _shithead_."

"A job," the guy wheezes, and Sanji swings the tire iron, lets it land with a crack on the guy's ribs. The guy screams, and Sanji lifts the tire iron up again, grips it with both hands this time.

"And?!" he roars. There's blood roaring in his head, just like his voice, and he feels like he's going to faint. But fuck this shit-- he'll brain the guy, get someone's brain splattered out all over. "You gonna try again, you _asshole_?!"

"No," the guy wheezes, and there's blood coming out of his mouth. Sanji's feeling pretty good about that--crack his skull, and he'll fucking break your ribs. Bitch.  
    
"Good," he says, and then he turns around and throws up.

The guy's name is Gin. He tells him that when he's helping Sanji into the taxi. Sanji tries to wave him off, but Gin just ends up kinda pushing at him, and then they both fall over into the back of the taxi, and yeah, oh god, Sanji's pretty sure his brains are gonna start coming out of his ears.

"You always this stupid?" he asks, and his voice is kinda slurry. He thinks that might be a bad sign, and apparently, Gin thinks so too, because he's kinda reaching out real gingerly, like he's going to touch Sanji's head. Hah. As though Sanji would let him. Sanji waves him off, says, "Don't think about it, fuck."

"It wasn't anything personal," Gin says, like that excuses him for wrapping metal around Sanji's skull. Sanji wants to say something, but the taxi takes off then, and all of Sanji's attention is taken up by the pressing need to not puke up his guts, or black out, or, you know, have his brain dribble out his nose. He cradles his head very carefully between his hands, and when Gin touches his shoulder, asking, "Hey, you?" in a very worried sounding voice, he realizes he's whimpering.

"Can't even kill people right," he tries to say, but when he blinks, the world apparently decides it should try to blind him, and the reflection on the plastic seat covers in front of him send bullets of pain through his head.  
    
Then he throws up again.

When he wakes up, he's lying down, and he's looking up at a ceiling, pockmarked like the ceiling of his old high school. He blinks, feels like he's going to die, and blinks again.  
    
"You awake?" Zeff asks, and Sanji closes his eyes and wishes he was dead.

"No," he says, and Zeff punches him. Hard.

" _FUCK_ ," he screams, "what the _hell_ ," except screaming hurts even more than Zeff's punch, and then he's cradling his head in his hands and trying to convince himself he's not dying, and he'd dry-heaving, too, straining against Zeff's hands and the IVs in his hands and arms.

"The good news," Zeff says, like Sanji isn't spitting stomach acid all over his shoe (and one metal leg), "is you're not dead."  
    
Sanji spits a little more acid, just for spite.

It's just before midnight when Zeff finally gets Sanji signed out of the hospital. Sanji doesn't really bother doing shit. He just lies very still on the cot, and when the nurses go by, he tries to charm them into more morphine. He mostly succeeds, and by the time Zeff is trying to steer him out of the hospital, he can mostly walk, and the headache is mostly gone. Or at least behind a cotton-gauze feeling.  
   
"So how'd you manage to get mugged?" Zeff asks when he's driving them home. Sanji's leaning back against the headrest, and he's fiddling with the window switch. Zeff must be feeling pretty good (or pretty bad, something), because he's not bitching Sanji out about it; just driving nice and smooth, slow turns. It feels nice, like Sanji can fall asleep.

"Mugged?" he asks. "I thought-- What?"  
    
"They said," Zeff says, "that some punk dropped you off, said he saw you get mugged."

Sanji thinks about it for a long moment, then opens his eyes and looks at the red taillights of all the cars before him. "You mad?"  
    
"No," Zeff says, but the way he pounds on the steering wheel kinda says otherwise. Sanji tries to roll his eyes, and just ends up slumping a little further down in his seat, eyes closing again.

"Dunno," he says, "can't really remember."

Zeff must've said something to the guys, because they're real nice to Sanji. Zeff sits up in Sanji's room, wakes Sanji up every two or three hours-- _got a concussion yet? no? yeah? shut up, brat, and go back to sleep_ \--and gives Sanji a cup of water, helps him get to the bathroom when Sanji's legs refuse to cooperate.  
    
The guys are just as nice--when Sanji finally makes it downstairs the next day, they don't heckle him, don't even look at him. Just ignore him, and when he lies down on the couch in Zeff's office, they even kinda pipe down a little.

He falls asleep there, and when Zeff wakes him up, late in the afternoon, there's a crick in Sanji's neck and his left leg's asleep.  
    
His head still hurts like a bitch, too.

"Soup," Zeff says, and he shoves it at Sanji, holds out a spoon imperiously. Sanji takes the spoon, and puts it into the bowl. Looks at the ripples and asks, "Chicken?"  
   
"For the invalid," Zeff says, and Sanji eats it all, drinks down the last of the broth.  
   
Zeff takes it back, and Sanji lies back down, and when he wakes up, there's a blanket covering him and Patty's leaning back in Zeff's old leatherback chair, squeaking back and forth.  
    
"You awake, Sleeping Beauty?" Patty asks.  
 Sanji grunts and rolls over, shoving his face against the back of the couch. Zeff's chair squeaks as Patty rocks, back and forth, and when Sanji's trying to decide whether or not to drag himself upstairs to sleep, Patty says, "Zeff wants to know if your homework's done."  
    
Sanji thinks about it for a moment, then says, "I'm not going to school tomorrow."

"Oh, that'll go over great with the Boss." The bastard sounds like he's laughing. The bastard.

It must not be a busy night, because there's a constant stream of cooks and waiters through Zeff's office, and they're all sarcastic, but they give Sanji food, bites of this and that, fresh fruit and vegetables and a sliver of the truffle Zeff has been hoarding in the backroom. Sanji eats a few pieces, leaves the rest on Zeff's desk, and when Carne brings in a deck of cards, Sanji shuffles out a hand.

He's just won back his sliver of truffle when Zeff comes in like a storm, metal leg clacking ominously. "Kitchen staff," he yells, and Sanji winces, drops his cards to cover his ears. "Who's on soup? Where the hell are the appetizers? The roast isn't done--" then he rounds on Sanji. "And your homework?!"

"I'm not going to classes," Sanji says, and Zeff seems to grow a couple feet taller and hundred pounds heavier. "My head," Sanji tries to add, a little feebly, because Zeff is standing between him and the door, and he's still feeling pretty shaky.

Zeff kinda shrinks a little then, almost back to his normal level of terror, and he frowns at Sanji. Then steals the fucking _sliver of truffle_ , and walks out of the office, yelling for the soup chef to get his ass over to his station, pronto.  
    
Sanji watches his sliver of truffle go, then goes upstairs to his room to do his homework.

Zeff wakes him up in the morning, and has Sanji sit on a chair in the bathroom, where he unwraps the bandage from Sanji's head and washes Sanji's hair around the stitches.  
    
"Good swing," Zeff says gruffly, and Sanji grunts, says, "Pretty sick of you, old man, to be praising the son of a bitch."

Zeff shrugs, and when he rewraps Sanji's head, his big fingers are real soft, real gentle, like Sanji's mom's-- Sanji clears his throat and stares at the floor beneath his feet until his eyes feel clear again.  
   
Zeff drives him to school, too, and Sanji's starting to get an idea of how much things must've shaken him up, because Zeff's talking to him about school, asking all these stupid, awkward questions that make Sanji love the old man a little bit more.  
    
"You like your classes?" Zeff asks, and before Sanji can say anything, he asks, "Are they hard? College, that's--" Zeff clears his throat, changes lanes. "College's a real good thing."

"It's okay," Sanji hedges, and when Zeff's face tightens a little, like he's proud of Sanji, Sanji looks out the window, fiddles with his backpack. "My classes are pretty interesting. I mean, they're mostly boring, but sometimes, you know."  
    
"Right," Zeff says, and Sanji shudders to think of what Zeff is probably going to say when he gets home to the restaurant and the two dozen chefs that call him boss.

Zeff drops him off in the roundabout, and when Sanji's opening up the door, he shoves a crumpled twenty at Sanji, says, "Buy yourself lunch, or something."

Sanji takes the crumpled, damp bill, and he shoves it into his pocket, muttering, "Thanks," as he gets out of the car.

He stumbles up out of the roundabout, so he won't get hit by any of the campus shuttles, then turns around and watches Zeff drive off, in that stupid old clunker he's been driving for most of Sanji's life.

Sanji's the center of attention--or rather, his head is the center of attention. The girls in his seminar coo over him, pet his hair gently, and ask him what happened as they circle their hands around his arms. He grins at them, says something off-handedly about getting mugged, no worries. They coo more, and worry over him, ask him if he's okay, walking home through the worst part of town.

"It's fine," he says, and he grabs Elisa's hand, turns it over to trace a line across her palm. "My lifeline, you know, is very long."  
    
They all giggle, and offer to lend him their notes, and when he winces, says the light's too bright for his headache, one girl kisses his forehead.  
    
This might, he thinks, have been the greatest blessing in disguise.

His second seminar's not so great. He's been paired with a freshman for a term project, and the kid is constantly panicking, and the pure, highstrung _energy_ of the kid is enough to drive Sanji crazy on a good day. Today, it's about to drive Sanji to leaping out of the window.  
    
"Usopp," he says, "it's not due for another three weeks."

Usopp, he knows, is from the wrong side of the tracks, just like Sanji was. So when Usopp says, highstrung and frantic, "If I lose my _scholarship_ ," Sanji lifts up his hands, says, "Fine. You do it, and just tell me where to sign my name."

Usopp looks at Sanji like he's been betrayed, and Sanji wants to scream, because he can't figure out why this kid is _so fucking hard to please_ , when Sanji can get all the girls in the class to melt whenever he even smiles at them. Sanji takes a deep breath and says, "I have a headache. I'm going home."

Usopp makes a betrayed sound, to match his betrayed face, and Sanji grabs his bag and beats a hasty retreat, taking the back stairs out to the unloading dock. From there, he cuts off the quad, heading for the student life building and the leather couches on the third floor, where he can maybe take a nap while he waits for the day to end, so Zeff won't know he's skived off his classes again.

He's halfway across the quad when he sees the tire iron bastard, and he stops, swinging his bag off his shoulder and holding it loosely in his hands so he can swing it at the guy's head.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" he asks as the guy gets closer. He tightens his grip on the strap of his bag, loosens it, and starts to pull his bag back, readying it for a swing.

The guy must notice, because he stops about ten feet away, holds up his hands like he's harmless. Yeah, right, fucking _bitch_. Sanji's a little placated, though, to see that the guy's still limping.

"Your wallet." The guy reaches into his pocket, then pulls out a beat up wallet that, if Sanji squints, does kinda look like Sanji's. "Your school ID was in it, so I came by."  
    
Sanji swings his bag back a little further and scowls, says, "Toss it over, then."

The guy tosses the wallet, and when Sanji jerks his chin up (and fuck, that makes his headache just get _worse_ ), the guy steps back a few feet, and turns halfway away while Sanji bends down to grab his wallet.  
    
Sanji swings his bag up onto his shoulder, then thumbs through his wallet. Cards, money; even the condom slipped into the innermost pocket is still there. "The hell?" he asks. "Why the fuck you'd mug me, then?"

"I wasn't--" The guy sounds affronted, like Sanji accused him of kicking a _puppy_. "I wasn't _mugging_ you. I told you, it was a job, but-- Look, I'm really sorry about that. I didn't think you'd, uh."  
    
"Bleed?"

"Live." The guy looks a little uncomfortable, small mercies. "I mean, after the first hit, they usually just stay down. I didn't think you'd, uh. Get up."

"So what?" Sanji asks, and he's starting to feel a little hysterical. If this is what happens when he skips class, he thinks he'll become a repentant student. "You're going to finish the job _now_?"  
    
And just in case the guy really is, Sanji shoves his wallet into his pocket and pulls his bag back off his shoulder, starts to swing it back for momentum.

"No! No, uh--" The guy takes a few steps forward and, when Sanji swings his bag out, stops short. "I was going to apologize. And maybe buy you a coffee."  
    
It is the most awkward not-date of Sanji's life.

The guy ("Gin, my name is Gin. Did you seriously forget?") keeps walking too close, then freezing up, like he thinks Sanji is going to kick him in the balls again. And when Gin tries to catch the door with his shoulder, he winces, a huge all-body clench of pain. When he sees Sanji looking, he grins and says, "Ribs. You hit fucking hard."

And that's a pretty piss-poor compliment, so Sanji says so.

He chooses the most expensive coffee on the menu, and after Gin pays for it (scrounging for every last cent in his stupid baggy trousers), Sanji grabs the cup and heads towards the noisiest table in the coffee shop, taking a seat right next to it.  
   
"So what do you want?" he asks, feeling bitchy and tired and sore. Gin sits across from him, holding a complimentary cup of water. Sanji takes a sip of the coffee, relishing the taste of pure expense, and scowls at Gin.

"Baratie, your old man," Gin starts, and Sanji interrupts, feeling furious, "He's not my father."

Gin looks at him kinda like Sanji has suddenly grown two heads, so Sanji takes another drink of the coffee, feels it slid hot and smooth down his throat.  
    
"Right," Gin says, "whatever. We don't really give a fuck. We just want his business."

"The restaurant?" Sanji laughs, just a little, and leans back in his chair, stretching his legs out under the table. Gin's legs are in the way, so he kicks at them, and Gin moves, scooting his chair out of the way. Easy. "What do you want with that?"

"Look, I don't-- It was just a job for me. Your old man--" when Sanji starts to sit upright, Gin corrects himself, says, "Baratie, whatever. He borrowed a lot of money, and some guys want him to pay it back. I was just supposed to give him an incentive."

And oh, okay, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense, and Sanji's seeing red now. He pulls his legs back, slams his feet into the ground, and leans forward across the table, putting his face close to Gin's. As loud as the restaurant is, there's no way Gin can't hear Sanji's voice, not when Sanji's mouth is next to Gin's ear and his hand is on Gin's shoulder, next to Gin’s throat.

"If you ever _fucking_ think of fucking with me, or Zeff, I will fucking put you in the grave. You understand that, shithead?" Gin breathes in sharply, and Sanji tightens his fist on Gin's shoulder until Gin breathes in even sharper. "I'll get that tire iron of yours, and I'll beat in your fucking skull until there's nothing else. You got that? You leave us the fuck alone, and you can tell that to your fucking boss, too."  
    
Then he throws the cup of ridiculously hot, ridiculously expensive coffee into Gin's lap, grabs his bag, and leaves.  
   
He is halfway home when he stops and says, very quietly to himself, "Oh. Shit. I just threatened the mafia."

Three days later, he's late for school and is cutting through an alleyway when he runs, not quite literally, into Gin. He skids to a stop just before he slams into Gin, and Gin kinda grins at him, resting a crowbar against his shoulder.

"Good morning, Sanji," Gin says, and Sanji aims a kick at his kneecap.  
    
When Gin crumples to the ground, Sanji takes a flying leap over his body and runs like the hounds of hell (or the dogs of the mafia) are all after him.

By the time he gets to school, he's out of breath and sweating, and his head is pounding again, hard enough to make him dizzy on his feet, black creeping along the edges of his sight. He staggers onto the quad, then sinks to the grass, falling back onto his back. His heart is beating madly against his chest, like it's about to burst, and there are prickles running up and down his legs.  
    
"Sanji?" Usopp asks, as if this day _couldn't get any worse_ , and Sanji groans and says to the air, "God, I'm out of shape."

"I was just wondering," Usopp says as he leans over into Sanji's face, with his obnoxiously round eyes and obnoxiously long nose, "if you had thought about our project."

"Yeah," Sanji mutters. He pulls at his dress shirt and groans again. It's soaked with sweat, and that's just nasty. Fucking hell. He lifts his feet, and yeah, sure enough, his dress shoes are scuffed, and he's going to fucking _kill_ Gin. "Sure. I think we should go to a strip club."

"I-- _what_?" Usopp leans in closer, until his nose is _poking_ Sanji's face. "Our _project_ , Sanji."

"Yeah," Sanji says as he pushes at Usopp's nose. "Economics. I say we go to a strip club and talk to the owner about the 'economy.'" He mimes finger quotes, just to be that much more annoying, and when Usopp's face darkens, he grins. "Economic depression, and three new strip clubs open up. Our professor would love that."

Usopp leaves with a huff that Sanji _thinks_ might mean, _I'll text you later, whatever, just get me a fucking A in the class_ , or something like that. Sanji stares up at the sky, and wonders if there's any point in going to class today.

In the end, he sleeps on the quad, waking up sometime just after noon so he can crawl into the shade, and sleep off the afternoon, too. By the second time he wakes up, his stomach is curling tight with hunger and the sun is halfway down the sky. He checks his phone, ignores a two missed calls from Zeff, and reads the text message from Usopp that says, sure enough, _whatevr i dnt care. when do u wannt 2 go. im busy friday night so on go_

Figures that Usopp would text like a teenaged girl. Sanji texts back, "saturday night then. i'll call you then," and rolls onto his back, and stares up at the sky.

Friday is beautifully Gin-free, and Sanji locks himself up in a study room with seven of his classmates, all girls. They study for about three minutes, then spend the next four hours flirting; the girls play with his hair, and he tugs at the hem of their shirts, asks each of them out in turn. They all say no, and blush, and then say yes, and by the time he heads home, he's got a week of dates lined up.

Saturday starts just as good as Friday ended; he works in the kitchen for the first shift of Saturday, doubling up with a line chef. Zeff almost compliments him, and Carne doesn't throw any of the plates at his head, and by the time the afternoon has rolled around, Sanji's feeling like this week has really turned around.

Then Zeff comes in, looks at the plate Sanji is putting together, and says, "too much garnish."  
    
When Sanji pulls off a sprig of parsley, Zeff scowls, then says, "Your friend's here. Take him upstairs, he's scaring the customers."

And yeah, that's pretty weird, because Usopp's a little weird, but he's not creepy (other than his obnoxiously round eyes and his obnoxiously long nose). Sanji slides the plate down the line to the next chef and heads for the door out to the dining room, reaching back to undo his apron as he goes.

When he gets to the dining room, he looks around and can't find Usopp. He walks a little further in, and looks around again, and then says a heartfelt, " _Fuck_ ," when he sees Gin sitting in the corner.

He slaps the apron down on Gin's table and grins as nasty as he can when Gin jumps, looking up at him. There's blood at the corner of Gin's lip, and some more by his eye. Gin frowns back at Sanji and asks, "Can I get some water?"

"What the fuck do you want?" Sanji hisses, leaning down towards the table. The restaurant is in a slow stretch right now, just before the evening rush, and it's quiet--too quiet, like all the customers are looking at their corner.  
    
"Some water," Gin says, then he adds, stupidly polite, "please."

Sanji's thinking about picking up the table and dropping it on his head, but when he grabs the table, he catches the sight of Zeff just out of the corner of his eye. Zeff is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, and he's frowning at Sanji and Gin like he's figuring something out. Then Sanji looks at Gin again, and oh, yeah, Gin looks like a punk, and that's not going to look good, because Zeff still has that painfully protective streak, and Sanji knows that Zeff isn't as young as he used to be, that Zeff can't hold the world on his shoulders like he used to be able to.  
    
Zeff, Sanji knows, is getting old.  
   
"Come on, then," he snaps, and he grabs his apron and turns around, heading for the kitchen.

Zeff's frown is bigger when Sanji gets close, so Sanji says, "He's a classmate. I think he got beat up, so I'm just gonna. Take him upstairs."

Zeff nods slowly and moves just barely to the side, so that Sanji has to brush past him, and so that Gin has to _squeeze_ past him. Sanji tries to hustle him through the kitchen, because all the chefs are starting to notice, and they all get that same annoying protective look in their eye, and when they see the blood on Gin's face, it's like an ocean of sharks with blood in the water.

"Hurry _up_ ," Sanji snaps even harsher, and he takes the back stairs three at a time, sliding on the double-back landing, then going up the second flight of stairs. He hears Gin stumble up the stairs behind him, and the clatter of metal in the kitchen downstairs.

When they get to Sanji's room, Gin is looking pretty green. Sanji closes his door, locks it, and leans against it, triple threat.  
    
"Why," he asks, "did you come here? I thought I told you to keep the fuck away."

"I wanted a glass of water."

"You came because you wanted water?" Sanji asks incredulously. Gin shrugs and looks around Sanji's room, and Sanji looks at his window, wonders if anyone would notice if he kicked Gin through it. Zeff would probably bitch about fixing it, but--  
    
"You gay?"

There. There is. Sanji turns to look at Gin, then runs the words through his head again. " _What_?"  
   
Gin motions around the room and says, like it’s completely sane, "You've got a lot of clothes. You gay?"

Sanji opens his mouth, then closes it. Then opens it again. "I," he starts to say, and Gin interrupts him.

"I won't, you know, beat you up if you are. I'm pretty liberal." He looks ridiculously pleased with that, and Sanji thinks he feels a little bit of madness coming on.

"How the fuck-- Of _course_ I'm not gay. The fuck."  
   
"Yeah?" Gin looks a little confused. "I just thought you were. I mean, you're always wearing those shirts with all the stripes. And those shoes."

They both look down at Sanji's shiny dress shoes for a long, long moment.  
   
"Listen," Sanji says desperately, "this is. Insane. You're insane. I have to go meet someone at a strip club, and you need to get the fuck away from our restaurant before I leave you in a gutter." Then he thinks about it, and about how Gin was trying to be stupidly polite, and decides, what the hell-- "Please."

"Strip club?" Gin repeats, and when Sanji groans, leaning back against the door, Gin says, "Yeah, okay, let's go."

It's the second most awkward not-date of Sanji's life.

The owner of the strip club is a little hard to talk to at first, until Gin suddenly looms up from behind Sanji's shoulder; then the owner is all politeness, offering them drinks and asking Usopp if he'd like the see the club's financial records. Usopp and Sanji take some notes, write down some phone numbers, and get a request from the owner to come back next weekend during the day, so they can see how the whole system runs. By the time the strippers take the stage, Usopp is looking at peace with the universe and Gin is looking like a cat who ate a canary.

"I'm off, then," Sanji mutters, and Usopp gives Gin a long stare. "You two have fun--"  
    
"Are you dating?" Usopp asks, point blank, and Sanji feels the universe more or less explode _in his face_.

" _Why_ ," Sanji explodes at Usopp, "does everyone think I'm _gay_? What the fuck? Fucking hell, I fuck _girls_ , I eat them out and I love their breasts and that--" He can't even say anything more, it's just towering rage, and he can only make a loud, incoherent growling noise.  
    
Usopp looks properly cowed, and Gin just laughs into a beer.  
   
So, just to prove his stalwart heterosexuality, he throws himself onto the stool next to Gin, orders a beer, and watches the strippers.

He slips bills, crumpled and damp, into the strings of the strippers' bikinis, and when they bend over him, their naked, tight breasts in his face, he breathes in the scent of their hair, and gets drunk off their femininity. And the beer.

By the time they leave, he's a little tipsy and Usopp is absolutely sloshed. Gin doesn't really seem that drunk, but he's grinning a lot more, so Sanji doesn't hold it against him--or does, because he lets Gin sling an arm over his shoulders.

"You college kids," Gin says, "you're fucking amazing."  
   
Usopp laughs delightedly on Sanji's other side, and says, "Yeah, it was my idea. You know, my projects, my projects are always--"  
   
He talks to Gin about something, some stupid lie about all of his brilliant projects, and Gin makes all the right sounds to seem suitably impressed. When Sanji thinks about it, realizes that what Usopp is saying is actually _him_ , he feels a little flattered. And still a little tipsy.

"God," he says, "did you see--" He shrugs off Gin's arm so he can shape his hands in the air, a twist of the wrists to mime two perfect rounds. "Did you see that one, the red-head? Did you see her tits? They were--" He twists his wrists again, and laughs, and Usopp laughs with him, and Gin slings his arm back over Sanji's shoulders and grins.

Usopp leaves to catch the last run of the thirty-third bus, and Sanji jogs across the avenue, dodging a slow-cruising car. When he steps up onto the sidewalk, Gin steps up next to him, and Sanji is in too good of a mood, is too tipsy, to complain.

"You're walking me home?" he asks, then he laughs, because he's never been walked home before. Because he's always walking girls home, putting them on the inside of his elbow, where they won't be splashed by water from passing cars. He walks on the edge of the curb, like he would with a girl, and Gin walks next to him, on the inside of his elbow. He tips his head back, breathes in the night air, and laughs again.  
    
"No," Gin says. He grabs Sanji's elbow when Sanji starts to sway, and Sanji yanks it away, teeters on the curb. A slow step into the gutter. "It's just the same way."

Sanji nods, then stops on the street corner, leans to look down the street.  
   
"You've got a cigarette?" he asks. His lips feel tingly, an empty feeling he thinks might be like the feeling an amputee feels. The ache of something missing. He pats down his pockets, and they're mostly empty-- scraps of paper, a bent paperclip. The change left from Zeff's crumpled twenty.  
    
Gin pats down his pockets, too, like he's mirroring Sanji, and he says, "I don't smoke."

"Shit." He pats down his pockets again, still the same, then steps off the curb, wanders into the street. Trails between the parked cars, shimmying where there's not enough room between bumpers. When he finally looks back, Gin is still standing at the street corner.

"Fuck you," Sanji yells good-naturedly, and he waves before he opens up the side door of the restaurant, sneaking into the kitchen.  
   
Zeff wakes him up before the ass-crack of dawn. Sanji stumbles downstairs, only half dressed, and helps Zeff with the storeroom’s inventory, counting the loads of flour and sugar and salt, the spices that tickle his nose, make him clear his throat. He takes a break when the sun has barely come up, and smokes in front of the restaurant with Zeff, crossing his arms against the morning chill.

"Your friend," Zeff says when Sanji is about to stub out his cigarette so they can head back in. Sanji pauses, takes one last desperate drag, then stubs it, grinding it, and his thumb, against the brick of the building. Bits of his skin fleck away, and he can see a spot of blood.  
    
"What?"

"Your friend," Zeff repeats. "The--" his perpetual frown deepens, like Gin is standing right in front of him. "--one who came by yesterday."

"Uh, yeah." Sanji opens the door, holds it for Zeff, and when Zeff has walked through, he follows behind him, still two strides for every one of Zeff's. "What about him?"

Zeff clears his throat, so Sanji clears his, too.  
   
"You never really brought friends home," Zeff says very slowly. Then, very quickly, and still with that distasteful look on his face, "You should have him come by for dinner."

"He's allergic," Sanji lies blandly. "To almost everything."

"Oh," Zeff says, and his face loses some of its distaste. "That's too bad."  
    
"Yeah."  
    
"Yeah."

He sends Sanji to argue out prices with their vegetable dealer, and that afternoon, when Sanji's sitting with the rest of the kitchen staff, eating a quick soup before the rush of the evening opening, one of the newer line chefs asks, "So we're not meeting his boyfriend?"  
   
The line chef hits the ground with Sanji's soup bowl nearly indented in his head.

"He's not my-- I'M NOT GAY."

When he turns to release his wrath on Zeff, Zeff is looking relieved. Sanji bites his tongue and sits back down, stabbed the handle of his spoon into the counter.  
    
"Where's some more fucking soup?" he asks darkly, and no one says anything the rest of the meal.

He helps the waiters in the evening rush, carrying plates along the length of his arm, change wallet chained to his waist, order pad slipped into the pocket of the apron. Whenever he goes into the kitchen to grab another set of orders, the kitchen goes creepishly quiet. When he leaves, he can feel everyone's eyes on the back of his neck, and there is an uncomfortable prickle down the line of his back.  
    
As soon as the restaurant is closed, he's going to fucking kill all of them.  
    
And then make a nice soup.  
    
Fuck.  
   
The night gets progressively worse: there are three complaints on food from Sanji's tables alone, and the line chefs are (newly) understaffed. The dishboys are already breaking plates right and left, and when Sanji walks into the kitchen, the soup chef backpedals to keep from bumping into him, and ends up knocking over the soup.  
    
The _basin_ of soup.  
    
The _fucking huge_ basin of soup.  
    
The fucking huge basin of _fucking hot_ soup.

Chefs up and down start screaming as the soup crashes over their shoes, like a new, tiny lake of lentil soup. Sanji bolts to Zeff's office, the door of which he slams shut, his back up against it so no one can come in.

"What the _fuck_?!" he yells, and Zeff looks up from the cookbooks on his desk, spinning his big leather-back chair to face Sanji. He looks at Sanji, then leans to the side, like he'll be able to _magically see through the wall_ to understand why all of his chefs are screaming like a bunch of ten-year-old girls.  
    
"What did you do?" Zeff asks gravely, and Sanji yells, "It wasn't me! Why do you always assume it was _me_?"

"Because it usually is you," Zeff says, and he gets up with a painful sounding crack. He motions Sanji away from the door. Sanji leans harder against the door, and tries to look like he's bigger than he is.

"It wasn't-- That's not the--" It's not the point, and he doesn't know what the point is, except that Zeff had looked relieved at dinner, and Sanji doesn't know why, and he wants to know (and doesn't want to know, doesn't want to think about why Zeff would look like that, why Zeff would think Sanji would be--). "I'm not--"

There's a thud against the door, probably the body of a line chef, and Sanji jerks and blurts out, "I'm really not gay."  
    
"Sanji," Zeff says, " _move_."

Sanji moves to the side, but the office is small, so Zeff has to squeeze past him. Zeff is huge--is still huge, even now that Sanji's an adult. Still larger than life, and Sanji is still looking up and up and _up_ at him, like Zeff is-- (the mountain, maybe, or a pillar--impossibly tall, impossibly real, impossibly alive.)

Zeff squeezes out of the office and Sanji lets out a breath, feels his knees quake with something like fear or nerves--like when he used to cheat on his math tests, like when he went on his first date. He's thinking about collapsing in Zeff's chair for a few well-deserved minutes when Zeff pops his head back in, looks at Sanji and says, like he's talking about the soup or the weather or the last shipment of spices, "I don't care if you are."

Then Zeff's face darkens and he opens the door a little bit more, pinning Sanji between the door and the wall. The doorknob is digging into Sanji's side and Sanji straightens up, sucking in his breath.  
    
"That punk, though," Zeff says darkly, "I'd rather put through a wall."  
   
Then Zeff leaves again, and when Sanji can hear him cussing out the soup chef, Sanji lets out the breath and staggers over to sink into Zeff's chair, and look at Zeff's cookbooks.

x

When Sanji had been in high school, he'd been befriended, mostly against his own will, by a weird country bumpkin who'd moved into the city.  
   
Luffy had been a pretty fucking annoying kid, and when he'd found out that Sanji was taking home ec, he'd started following Sanji around like a dog, like he thought Sanji was going to give him something.  
    
Sanji never had, but Luffy had never stopped, and then somehow they'd ended up _friends_ , weirdest shit ever.

They hadn't ever done anything outside of school--they ran in different circles. Luffy hung out with some weird foreign kid who was always sleeping beneath the bleachers, and Sanji had been too busy pursuing all the girls of the high school to really have friends.

Then they'd finished school, and Luffy had gone off to college (how the fuck he'd gotten in, Sanji didn't have a clue; Luffy was probably the stupidest kid Sanji had ever met), and Sanji had started working full-time at the restaurant.

When Luffy left for college, he'd left behind his weird foreign friend, and one day, while wasting time at a record store, Sanji had seen Luffy's friend browsing through cds and had, bored and looking for any excuse not to go home, said hello.  
    
Zoro was pretty much a prick.  
    
Correction: Zorro pretty much _is_ a prick.

He's always late, he always gets lost, and he criticizes Sanji on the stupidest of things. Also, one of Sanji's girlfriends had dumped him to go out with Zoro.  
    
Zoro hadn't even been dignified enough to date her.  
    
Bastard.  
   
Zoro is about the only friend Sanji has, though, and when Sanji thinks about _that_ , he just gets really depressed. Twenty-one, and his only friend is Zoro.  
   
"It's probably because of your clothes," Zoro says. Sanji groans and lies his head on his arms. The table is sticky and pretty nasty, and when he moves his arm a little, it feels like there's solidified sugar and fat trying to pull away his skin. _Nasty_.  
    
"That doesn't even make sense," Sanji says, and Zoro says back, "I mean, you do have a lot of clothes."

"I don't have that many clothes," Sanji hisses, then lies his head back down. He's already reconsidering his sanity in complaining to Zoro about everyone thinking he's--it was probably a stupid idea.  
   
"Huh." Zoro sucks annoyingly at his straw, trying to suck up the last of his drink, and _apparently his cup, too_. "Well, are you?"

"If you ever come to the restaurant again," Sanji promises as he tries to detach his sleeve from the table (brand new and brand name, and now probably ruined--Zoro always picks the shittiest places to eat), "I'll poison your food."  
   
Zoro just shrugs, but he gives Sanji a long look. After they've paid the bill, Zoro steals a half-dozen toothpicks while Sanji watches disapprovingly, then says, "Why's it such a big deal, even if you are?"  
   
Sanji wants to say something, but he doesn't really know what to say. He shrugs, and when Zoro offers him a toothpick, he takes it and chews it until it splinters in his mouth.  
    
They're sitting on the curb, like two social rejects, when Zoro says, "Hey, is there a kid named Usopp at your school?"  
   
Sanji bites on his cigarette, then says, "Uh, yeah. He's in my class. Why?"  
   
Zoro shrugs, chomping on a toothpick loudly. When Sanji shoves him, Zoro sighs, says, "I dunno, he's one of Luffy's friends. Luffy said he was starting college, and that he was probably going nearby. So I asked."

"Oh." Sanji takes a few last, long drags, then lights a new cigarette. He's watching the smoke curl up from his mouth when Zoro says, "Luffy's coming home soon."  
    
"Oh," Sanji says again.

They sit there for a long time, smoking and watching people walk by on the other side of the street. The girls are all cute: tight jeans and short jackets and shoes that make them totter into each other, giggling and hugging, their earrings flashing as they turn their heads. The guys are all in shredded jeans and faded shirts, heavy-built and with tossled hair, like they've just rolled out of bed.  
    
Sanji looks down at his bright, shiny shoes, and the garbage in the gutter that's collected around his ankles, and he asks, "Is it really okay?"

"What?" Zoro asks, and Sanji drops his cigarette into the gutter, rubs it out with his shoe.

"Nothing," he says as he stands up, brushing off the seat of his trousers. It's starting to get cold, and it'll be dark soon; Zeff will probably bitch at Sanji when he gets home, ask Sanji why he sticks around if he's never home. "I gotta go."

Zoro walks with Sanji halfway home, turning off when Sanji mentions that _this_ is Zoro's street, fuck it, and if Zoro can just walk two blocks without turning, he can make it home without getting lost _again_ , what an idiot, how do you still get lost when you've lived here for the last seven years.

When he gets home, Zeff bitches at him, asks him why he bothers coming home at all. Then Zeff hands him a plate of food, still warm from sitting in the back of one of the ovens. Sanji perches on a stool near the sinks and eats, watching Zeff bitch at everyone else with the same glower. When Zeff comes back over to bitch at Sanji some more, Sanji swallows another bite of food, then sets the plate on the counter, shoving it away from himself.

"You don't like my food?" Zeff bitches, bitching bitching _bitching_ , and Sanji says, "It tastes like crap," but he takes the fork and shoves down another bite.

He escapes the kitchen before anyone can rope him into helping, and hides out in his room, looking through the notes the girls in the class had given him; it's three weeks till finals, and he still hasn't read any of the textbooks. He's trying to decide if he should crack open the book for biology when his phone starts buzzing, the summer's number one hit in hideous midi.  
    
 _u ddnt come 2 school 2day_  
    
Usopp.

 _Yes I did_ , he texts back. _I didn't go to CLASS today._

Then he thinks about it, and sends another text.  
    
 _Longnose. Do you know Zoro?_  
    
 _yah y?_

Then he spends about five minutes trying to figure out how to make a long nose in an emoticon, and comes up with nothing. He finally texts back, _no reason. come over tomorrow, finish our presentation_.  
   
 _K_  
   
Usopp ends up following Sanji home after school, tagging along as Sanji swings by the vegetable vender to bitch some more, courtesy of Zeff. When they finally make it to Sanji's block, Sanji stops and pulls Usopp out of the foot traffic.

"Listen," he says, "when you go in, don't say shit. Just follow me up to my room, and don't talk to anyone. Okay?"  
   
"Sure," Usopp says, and just to make sure they're on the same page, Sanji says, "And don't fucking touch _anything_."

Sanji pokes his head in through the side door, then grabs Usopp's arm and drags him through. "Hurry up," he hisses, and Usopp _trips over his feet_. Sanji hauls him onwards, barely keeping them both upright, and then bodily throws Usopp up the stairs as he turns and yells, "I'm home!"  
   
"You're on line tonight," someone yells back from the deep freezer, and Sanji yells, "I'm busy, get someone else!"  
    
Then they curse, and he curses back cheerfully, all the while _shoving Usopp up the fucking stairs_.  
    
Usopp stumbles again when they get to Sanji's room, but that's probably because Sanji left a couple pairs of shoes right inside the room. Usopp somehow manages to land on Sanji's bed, and Sanji kicks a pair of the shoes away (the hightops), then carefully picks up the rest and puts them back into their boxes.

"Wow," Usopp breathes, and Sanji shoves a shoebox under his desk and picks up a belt. "You've got a lot of clothes."

Sanji freezes, then grabs another belt, and tosses both belts over the back of his chair. "Not really," he says dismissively, and grabs his shirt, yanking it off.  
    
"What-- What are you _doing_?"  
   
"I got mustard on my shirt," Sanji says, because apparently Usopp is an _idiot_. "The stain will set if I don't get it out, and it's Burberry."

Usopp just stares at Sanji like he's deaf, or Sanji's speaking French, so Sanji scowls and snaps, "Just wait five minutes, and I'll be back. _Fuck_."

In the hall bathroom, he soaks the shirt and pats on a paste, then sets it to the side of the sink so the paste can dry. Then he washes his face and digs the sleepies out of his eyes. When he goes back into his room, hair a little damp and hanging in his face, Usopp is sitting on the edge of Sanji's bed with a really, really, _really_ fucking obvious guilty face.

"What the hell did you do, Longnose?" Sanji asks as he shuts the door. Usopp jumps as the door clicks shut and Sanji rolls his eyes. "I'm not going to kill you, fuck."  
   
"Nothing, I just-- Nothing." Usopp swallows, loud enough that Sanji can hear it, and Sanji grabs a shirt from a pile on the floor, dragging it on.

"You're a shitty liar," he says, and Usopp twitches, looking towards the window.

"Uh," Usopp says, "it's, um. Pretty cool. That you live above a restaurant."  
    
It's a pretty obvious diversion, but Sanji's feeling mollified enough by it to say, "Yeah, Zeff's a pretty good chef."

Usopp eventually slides off the bed, and Sanji sits on the floor, too, and they look over their notes, comparing what they remember from the strip club (which isn't much, especially for Usopp). Sanji's pointing at a number, asking Usopp where the hell he pulled it from, when Zeff opens his door and says, "What the fuck are you doing? The soup chef--"  
   
Then Zeff stops and looks at Usopp, and Usopp makes a choking sound and looks at Zeff, and Sanji says, "Fucking hell, learn to knock. _Fuck_."

Then he revises his statement and says, before Zeff can break his skull, "We're working on a project for our economics class. I _told_ you that."

Which, really, he didn't, but what the fuck. He's twenty-one, he should be allowed to have his _own fucking room_ without people bursting in at all hours to complain about _soup chefs_.  
    
Zeff seems to grow a little in anger, and Sanji scowls at the economics report spread across the floor.  
   
"Five minutes, Sanji," Zeff snaps, "then get your ass downstairs."  
   
As soon as Zeff leaves, thumping heavily down the stairs, Usopp grabs at his half of the papers, shoving them into his ugly messenger bag.  
    
"I should go," Usopp says, and Sanji snaps, "No, you're staying."

"No, really," Usopp says, and he's grabbing his economics book. "I should be getting home. It's, uh--kinda late--"  
    
"No," Sanji says louder, "you're staying, because I want this done tonight. Besides," and he winces as he says it, "you can stay for dinner."

So when he goes downstairs, Usopp goes with him, sans ugly messenger bag. Zeff glares at him from the office as Sanji leads Usopp through the kitchen and out to the restaurant's dining room.

"You can sit in the back corner," Sanji says. "The light back there's shitty, so we usually don't seat anyone there. I'll bring you something later."  
    
When Usopp nods and starts to head over, Sanji adds, "And don't _touch_ anything."  
   
After he's washed up and has donned a chef's coat swiped from Zeff's office, he starts in with the soup chef, starting up a second round of soup. It's minestrone this time, and he's trying to find the fucking carrots when he hears someone ask, "So, wait, is that kid dating Sa--"  
    
That's when he breaks the wooden ladle.

Zeff bitches him out in the office for almost an hour, and by the time he finally gets out, his head is aching and he has a bruise the size of a grapefruit on his shoulder. The kitchen, which was really fucking loud moments before, falls ominously silent when Sanji leaves Zeff's office.

"You guys," Sanji says, "are really fucking obvious." Then he ducks Zeff's fist and hightails it for the dining area, swiping a plate from the line chefs as he goes.

He breathes a little easier when he slides onto a chair at Usopp's table, because as mad as Zeff may be, he won't ever bitch at Sanji out here. Usopp is reading a newspaper, probably swiped from the waiting area at the front of the dining room, and he looks up when Sanji sits down.  
    
"Here," Sanji says, pushing the plate across to Usopp. "If you want soup, I'll get someone to bring some out."

"No, it's okay," Usopp mutters. He's already tearing open the napkin wrapped utensils, and is grabbing his fork, stabbing it into the slice of pork. Then he turns it over and says, in a very stiff voice, "Are those mushrooms?" 

"Yeah, why?" Sanji reaches out and snags a piece of the asparagus with his fingers. He pops it into his mouth, chews it, and looks toward the kitchen. He can see Zeff glowering from inside, and so he chews even more defiantly.

"Um." Usopp turns the pork back over onto the bed of rice and mushrooms. "No reason. It looks real, uh, nice. Like the kind of place my parents used to take me."

"Yeah?" Sanji steals another piece of asparagus and chews it in Zeff's general direction. Then he wipes his buttery fingers on the chef's coat. "Glad you like it."

Usopp eats real slowly, first the asparagus, then the pork. Then the rice. He's half-done when Sanji says, "You're not eating the mushrooms."

Usopp kinda pokes at a mushroom with the tines of his fork, then takes another bite of rice, like that will fool Sanji.  
    
When he's scooping another mouthful of rice onto the fork, Sanji reaches out and grabs the plate away, saying, "Fine, you're done. Gimme the spoon."

Before Usopp can say anything, Sanji grabs the spoon himself, and scrapes up the last of the rice and all the mushrooms, eats it in two quick bites.  
    
"Let's go then," he says as soon as he's swallowed, and Usopp says, "Uh, okay."

Then Sanji remembers that he broke Zeff's favorite ladle over someone's head, and says, "But we'll go in the backway."

Which is how they end up out in the alleyway, Sanji trying to figure out how to open up the storage door and Usopp bitching about how it's cold, can't Sanji hurry up, Usopp has other classes and more homework and he needs to go home, bitch bitch bitch.  
    
" _Fuck_ ," Sanji finally snaps, "shut _up_."

That just makes Usopp bitch _more_ , and Sanji is wondering when, in the last few hours, Usopp lost his fear of Sanji.

"Finally," Usopp says when the door swings up, on the fiftieth or sixtieth try, and Sanji says, "Thank _god_ ," because if he had to listen to Usopp any longer, he was going to rub the kid's face against a brick wall until his stupid _nose_ came off.  
    
Or something.

They crowd into the storage room together, Sanji stumbling into Usopp as he pulls the heavy loading door closed, then they sneak out onto the landing at the bottom of the stairs.

Sanji starts up the stairs, then, when he's halfway up, realizes that Usopp isn't behind him. He takes the stairs a quiet three at a time, then kicks Usopp in the ass to get Usopp moving. Usopp turns away from the kitchen (and why he was watching the _kitchen crew_ , of all things, Sanji doesn't really care) and follows him upstairs. When they get to Sanji's room, Sanji sinks onto his bed with a sigh.

"God, this place is a pain," he moans at the ceiling, and Usopp laughs a little awkwardly.  
    
"It's kinda cool, though," Usopp says. "I mean, a restaurant and stuff. And your dad-- I mean, he's scary, but he seems kinda--nice?"

Sanji presses the flat of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, then says, "He's not my dad."  
    
"O-oh." Usopp fidgets in the middle of the room, then kinda stumbles to the side and sits on Sanji's old chair. "Uh, sorry. Um."

"We're not really alike," Sanji adds, because he's staring at the ceiling and he can't see Usopp's face--because he's never told anyone, and because Usopp snuck in through the storage room with him. Because Usopp is stupid and annoying and has obnoxiously round eyes and an obnoxiously long nose. "Not at all."  
    
"Really?" Usopp humps the chair closer to the bed, and Sanji rolls his eyes, because now _everyone_ downstairs will know they're in Sanji's bedroom. Idiot. "I thought-- I mean, you guys look a lot alike."

"Idiot," Sanji says, and Usopp says some very unflattering things in a very loud voice.

"Your friend wasn't here," Usopp says suddenly, and wow, if that wasn't a really weird thing to say. 

Sanji blinks at the ceiling, then frowns, trying to figure out who Usopp is talking about. Finally, he just asks, "Who?"

"That guy. The one who came with you to the strip club."

"Gin?!" Sanji sits up, leaning forward on his hands. "You mean that idiot with the weird earrings?"

"He was wearing earrings?"  
   
Sanji just rolls his eyes, because there's just no winning sometimes. "Yeah, well. Why would you think he was my friend?"

"Just--" Usopp scoots forward until he's sitting on the edge of his chair, his knees pressed against the side of Sanji's bed. "You seemed close. I mean, I've only seen you that close with, uh, girls in our class. You never really talk to anyone else, so I thought--"

Usopp must've seen Sanji's face, because he trails off with a nervous laugh.  
   
"He's not my friend," Sanji says coldly, and Usopp nods, says, "Right, sure. I get it."

Then Usopp lunges forward, and Sanji twists, pushing his shoulder forward so it slams into Usopp's chest. Usopp wheezes out, and his hands grip at Sanji, one around Sanji's wrist, the other on Sanji's waist. Sanji pulls back his other hand, then punches Usopp neatly on the mouth.  
    
"What the hell?" he shouts as Usopp scrambles back, falling onto the floor. "I don't even-- What the _hell_?"

"No, nothing, nothing," Usopp babbles, and he's scrambling backwards and upwards at the same time, looking like a demented crab. He grabs his stupid, ugly messenger bag, and says, "I should go--"  
   
He's already down the stairs before Sanji can get to the staircase. By the time Sanji gets to the bottom of the stairs, Usopp has already run out the side door, and everyone in the kitchen is looking back at Sanji. And yeah, shit, the rumors are going to be brutal. Sanji scowls at them, says, "What are you looking at, you fucking _assholes_ ," then takes the stairs three at a time to get out of Zeff's spoon-throwing range.

When he remembers to go check his shirt (after two in the morning, when everyone's left and Zeff has gone to bed, his metal peg thump thump thumping down the hallway past Sanji's door), the paste has bleached away the mustard stain and half of the shirt's logo. Sanji curses softly, rinses off the paste as best he can, and crawls into bed, feeling like today was a pretty shitty day all around.

Wednesdays he has economics; Usopp's not there yet when he walks in, so he sits in his normal seat, seventh row from the front, third seat from the aisle. He pulls out his phone, looks through a few texts (all from Zoro, stupid things like _call me back_ and _wanna get lunch tomorrow?_ ), and finally lies his head on his arms.  
   
When Usopp walks in, he looks over at Sanji, then looks away way faster than he looked over. His mouth is split and swollen, and there is crusted blood on his lip, like the scab just won't stay. Sanji presses his bottom lip against his top teeth, then looks down at the board, so he won't have to see Usopp's stupid hair.

When class ends, he grabs his stuff and hightails it out of there, taking the left hallway down through the old business building. It's mostly faculty offices now, and no one really goes down the hallway unless they need to fuck a teacher into a higher grade. It's quiet, his leather-soled shoes whisper-soft on the linoleum, and he texts Zoro back, says, _today at 2?_

He bitches at Zoro about everything except Usopp; about school and the restaurant and Zeff, even about Gin and the tire iron. Zoro looks at him blandly through the whole thing, like a stupid cow, and when Sanji finally runs out of things to say (but not the thing he wants to say the most, which is _what the hell, why the hell did Usopp_ \--), Zoro says, “And?"

" _Nothing_ ," Sanji snaps, "that's it," and Zoro shrugs, takes a bite of his revolting chicken.

"The food isn't even done properly," Sanji complains, and he chokes down a few bites, then shoves his plate at Zoro, lets him eat the rest of it.

"Yeah, well." Zoro finishes Sanji's plate off, scraping up the last of the sauce with his fork, sucking it clean before it can drip from the tines. "Usopp piss you off or something?"  
    
Sanji doesn't _freeze_ , exactly, but he does pause momentarily. Then he wipes his mouth on his napkin and wads the napkin into a ball, drops it on his plate. "No, why?"

"He called me last night. He doesn't really talk to me much, so it was kinda weird. He thought you were going to kill him." Zoro leans back in his chair with the sigh of the well-fed, then asks, like a lazy cat, "Are you?"

"What? No." Sanji frowns and tries to wave for their check. The waiter looks at them, then walks away. Shit.  
   
"'kay."

When Zoro waves for the waiter, the guy comes over right away, bearing their check and a shit-eating smile. The fucking little bitch. Sanji digs out just enough money for the food, and absolutely nothing for the tip.  
   
"I gotta go," Sanji says, scraping back his chair to stand up. Zoro nods distractedly, probably trying to figure out the right amount for a tip. "Don't leave a tip, the guy was a douche."

"'kay," Zoro says, then leaves a stupidly big tip. Sanji scowls and steals a few dollars.  
    
"You know," Zoro says, when Sanji's shoved the bills into his pocket and is about to leave, "Usopp's a good kid."

"Yeah?" Sanji thinks about last night, how Usopp had lunged at him--how before, they'd snuck in through the storage room like a bunch of kids. "How do you know?"  
    
"Dunno. Luffy likes him, though."

Yeah, that's pretty fucking stupid, so Sanji tells him so, and Zoro says that Sanji's pretty fucking stupid, too, and then Sanji kicks out the legs of Zoro's chair, sending Zoro crashing to the ground. Before Zoro can untangle himself from the chair, Sanji steals the last of the tip, gives Zoro the same shit-eating smile the waiter gave him, and leaves.

 _bitch_ , Zoro's text says three and a half minutes later, _you owe me the tip_  
    
 _fuck you_ , Sanji texts back, and he laughs all the way home.  
    
x

 _Tap_.

It's a half-past midnight, and Sanji's staring at his biology textbook, which more or less makes _no sense_.  
    
 _Tap_.  
   
It takes him a while to realize that the tapping sounds aren't coming from the kitchen below, and then he has to look around for a few seconds before he realizes, _oh_ , his window.  
    
Then he thinks, _what the fucking hell_.  
   
He yanks open the window, and it bounces off the top of the frame, crashes down to hit his _fucking head_ , and holy hell, that fucking _smarts_ , and he's sinking to the floor because that was where he got brained with the tire iron.  
    
"Oh," he groans, "oh fuck," and he has to press his forehead against the cool wall for a few moments.  
    
He's still trying to figure out if he's going to pass out when he hears a voice shout, "Sanji?"  
   
He lunges upwards, and collapses against the windowframe, hanging half out of it. When he squints blearily down, he can see a stupidly familiar-looking head.  
    
"Gin? What the fuck."  
   
"Sanji." Gin is looking up at Sanji, and he looks like he might be smiling, but Sanji's feeling pretty concussed, so he might be making any kind of face. "Let me up."  
    
"Fuck you," Sanji says, and then he groans again, leans his head against the frame. "Fuck, you have bad timing."  
   
"Seriously, Sanji," Gin says, "let me in. Your old man won't."  
   
Sanji works through that, then smiles at nothing in particular. "Right. That's the point, fucker."

The window slides shut with a smooth click, and Sanji collapses back on his bed, muffles a groan when his head hits the pillow--ow, fuck, shit, goddamn. He's looking up at the ceiling, wondering if he should go check and see if the back of his head is bleeding, when the tapping at his window starts again.

"Fucking stop it!" he screams down as soon as the window is open. Gin looks up at him, making some kind of face Sanji can't see, and then Zeff comes blowing in through Sanji's door.

"What the hell?!" Zeff rages. "If you wake up the neighbors again, I'll fuck skin you--"

Then Zeff looks at the window, and at Sanji, and walks over in an immense kind of towering rage that has Sanji slumping down on his bed, feeling utterly defeated.  
   
Zeff sticks his head out the window, then bellows, "What the fuck are you doing here, punk?!"

Zeff slams the window shut hard enough that the entire wall shudders, and Sanji thinks he sees the glass crack a little. He thinks about mentioning it, then thinks better of it when Zeff turns the rage on him.  
    
"Sanji--"  
    
"My head," Sanji interrupts, and he points at the back of his head. And if he makes his hand shake a little, well, survival and all that shit. "The window hit it--"

Zeff drags him into the bathroom, where he sits Sanji on a chair again. There's blood in Sanji's hair, and Zeff grumbles as he tries to pull it away from the skin. It's not that bad--can't be that bad, because as much as headwounds bleed, this is already closing up, and the hair is clotting together with drying blood.

Zeff ends up washing Sanji's hair, then wrapping an ace bandage around it awkwardly while Sanji stares at the edge of the sink, where there are smears of dried toothpaste. When Zeff is trying to figure out how to tie off the bandage, he asks, "What was that punk doing here?"

Sanji feels the muscles in his legs bunch up and he spreads his hands open on his legs, sweat from his palms sinking into his pajamas.  
   
"I dunno," he says. He thinks about saying that Gin was throwing rocks at his window, but that'd probably just make Zeff even more pissed off, because Zeff has a thing about personal property.

"Yeah?" Zeff finally figures out how to tie off the bandage, and he smooths the ends out, tucks them in under the bandage. "Is he bothering you?"  
   
"What? No." Sanji rubs his hands on his thighs, up and down, then stops, because he can see Zeff start to frown at him through the mirror.

"If there's ever anything you don't want," Zeff suddenly says, and his face is twisting up like he's eating that nasty custard Carne fucked up that one time, "then you say no. And if he doesn't listen--"  
    
Oh. Oh god. They were not having this conversation. They were not--

"He's not," Sanji says frantically, "doing anything. He's not-- Why does everyone--"  
   
"--then you _tell_ me," Zeff says, and his twisted up face twists even more, like he's about to maim someone just thinking about it, "and I'll _make_ him listen--"

" _He's not_ ," Sanji shrieks, and yeah, so what if his voice is going up a few octaves, because this is _insane_ , " _doing anything_ \-- _We're not_ \-- THIS IS INSANE."

Zeff clears his throat, then pats Sanji awkwardly on the head, then pulls his hand back just as quickly, looking disturbed at his display of--of _affection_.

"Well," Zeff says, then he turns around and walks out, heading back to bed or his office or _wherever the hell he goes when he's just destroyed Sanji's very soul_.

Sanji sits on the chair for a long time, until he feels less like running after Zeff and trying to explain just _how wrong Zeff is_. Because Zeff is wrong. Very, very wrong. Finally, when his feet are cold, he gets up and goes back to bed, leaving the chair sitting in the middle of their tiny bathroom

When he gets to his room, he looks around, then kinda sidles over towards the window, and glances outside. He can't see straight down, though, so he slides the window open a little, and holding it so it doesn't fall and _chop off his head this time_ , looks down.

Gin isn't down there. Sanji isn't really surprised, because he sure as hell wouldn't stick the fuck around after Zeff told him to get the hell out of Dodge. Sanji closes the window again and crawls up the foot of his bed, until he has to kinda squirm to get his legs under his covers.  
    
When he wakes up the next morning, it's to Zeff's glowering face.

"'n fuck?" he asks blurrily. Zeff's glower deepens and Sanjij kinda scoots back further under his covers, like his comforter will somehow save him from whatever pissed Zeff off.

"Breakfast," Zeff says roughly, and he grabs Sanji's covers and pulls them off. Sanji jerks for them, trying to pull them back, and Zeff just tosses them over the foot of the bed. "Get up."

There are pancakes sitting in the kitchen downstairs, covered with enough maple syrup to probably drown a horse. There's a stool pulled up close to the pancakes, and when Zeff goes to cook ominously at the long line of stoves, Sanji sits on the stool.

The metal of the seat is freezing through the thin material of Sanji's pajamas, and Sanji winces, then drags the stool closer to the counter. He eats the pancakes noisily, messily, and complains about too much this, too much that. Not enough syrup.

Zeff comes over with a frying pan when Sanji's half done with the pancakes and practically pours half a pig's worth of bacon on top of Sanji's pancakes. Then Zeff sits down on the other side of the counter, and _watches Sanji eat_.

"Uh," Sanji swallows down a piece of bacon, "what?"

"How's your head?" Zeff asks. And yeah, they're really shitty at conversation, so Sanji says, "fine," and then they say nothing it all.

Sanji eats quickly, swallows down the food as it tries to stick in his throat, and Zeff kinda looks everywhere except at Sanji, and sometimes says little things about the kitchen, like, "need to extend the counter there" and "thinking of getting another set of ladles."

When Sanji stabs the last piece of bacon, shoving it into his mouth, Zeff pulls a glass of milk out of _the fuck knows where_ and sets it in front of Sanji and says, like Sanji's seven, not twenty-something, "Drink your milk."

It's a losing battle anyway, so Sanji rolls his eyes as he chugs it down, then puts the glass on top of the syrupy plate, shoving both further onto the counter. "Thanks," he says, and Zeff nods as they both get up, heading different directions.

When Sanji's leaving an hour later, finally done dressing and fixing his hair and yelling at Zeff that he's not _primping_ , for god's sake, so shut the fuck up, Zeff pokes his head out of the office door and says, "you've got an appointment at three."

"Three?" Sanji backpedals, grabbing onto the doorframe to keep himself upright, because the soles of his shoes are slick and the floor of the kitchen is smooth. "What appointment?"

"To get your stitches out." Zeff's head disappears from the doorway, and his door shuts, conversation over. Sanji frowns at the door, then heads out.

Thursdays are hellish because Biology 1010 is hellish. No amount of beautiful women can fully assuage Sanji's pain of just sitting in the classroom, learning the basics of DNA structure and cell formation and what the fuck ever.  
    
Of course, since it's Sanji, the girls try, and Sanji appreciates their efforts.

"I love your vest," a pretty little thing named Tilda says. She has this incredible head of hair, huge red curls that tumble down her back, and sometimes slide over her shoulder. Sanji loves to watch her write notes, the way she frowns at her paper and leans close, her hair falling all over the desk.  
    
"Thanks," he says, and then he says, "it's silk."

That's the magic word, and she reaches out, touches his vest with her little fingers. She plucks at it, then makes a lovely little _oh_ , saying, "Oh, it's so smooth--"

Sanji scoots his chair closer to hers, and she lets him look at her notes during the lecture.  
    
After the class, they gather up their things, and Sanji doesn't offer to carry her books because he doesn't work _that_ fast, but he does open the door for her, and walks with her down the hallway.  
    
"Are you," she asks, and her voice, he thinks, is like the cooing of doves, "busy this weekend?"

He gets back to the restaurant just after two. Zeff and Carne are arguing over something about the setting of the tables, and Patty is terrorizing the newest waiter. Sanji drops his bag in Zeff's office and goes out to help set the tables, turning the plates and lying the napkin-wrapped utensils at slight angles.

"What are you wearing?" Tibo asks, sounding horrified, and Sanji looks down at his vest and trousers.

"Express and Chanel," he says, and when Tibo snorts he throws a plate at Tibo's head.

Zeff comes to collect him before he can break a third plate over Tibo's head. Sanji starts to put the plate down, then when he sees Tibo smirk, he throws it _hard_ , and laughs meanly when Tibo goes down. Zeff frowns at Sanji and Tibo both, and Sanji, feeling thoroughly unrepentant, follows Zeff to their ugly old car.

They don't talk in the car, or in the waiting room. When Sanji follows a nurse back to a examination room, Zeff follows like a small, silent mountain. Sanji sits up on the table and Zeff sits in a chair, and they both stare at the picture hanging over the desk: children's toys spread over a floor, sunlight streaming in through windows, the artist's signature scrawled in the left bottom corner.  
    
Zeff leans forward a little and says, "Looks like it's a puzzle."

"Huh," Sanji says.  
    
"Lot of work."  
    
"Yeah, probably."

Sanji is poking at the threads of a cuff button when the doctor comes in, a pretty woman with short, sensible hair and short, sensible heels. She's wearing black-rimmed glasses, and yeah, Sanji's always had a thing for the librarian look; with a lab coat on top, she's just about completing all the fantasies he's ever had.

"Sanji?" she asks, and Sanji smiles broadly at her, says, "That's me. How are you?"  
    
She laughs, a delightfully low laugh, and says, "I’m fine. I'm not the one with stitches in my head."  
    
She bends Sanji's head down and unwraps Zeff's clumsy bandage; her fingertips are cool and gentle, and Sanji stares down at the hemline of her skirt.

"Did you get hit again?" she asks, a little confused, and Sanji looks a little higher than her hemline.

"He hit his head on a windowframe last night," Zeff says. "It was bleeding, so I wrapped it."

"I see," the doctor says, and Sanji says grandly, "It didn't hurt."  
   
She pokes and prods, and Sanji winces a few times, and steadfastly counts the stitches of her hem.  
   
"Well," she says finally, and she lets go of Sanji's head. Sanji lifts his head, looks at her breasts, then at her face. "We can take the stitches out, but we'll have to wrap his head again."

Then she takes a small, delicate pair of scissors to Sanji's head, and Sanji has a flash of absolute horror, because if she _cuts his hair_ \--  
   
She gets a little bit of his hair, and when she leaves to find a suitable bandage ("everything here is too heavy, I'll get something from another office"), Sanji leaps off the table and twists around so he can try to check the back of his head in the mirror. He can't _see_ though, not where the stitches are, so he turns to Zeff and asks, horrified, "Is there a bald spot?!"

Zeff just stares back at him, not saying a word, and Sanji sinks onto the edge of the table and groans, "If Tilda sees a bald spot--"

Zeff indelicately clears his throat and asks, "Is Tilda a girl?"

"Of course," Sanji says, pure acid, "Tilda is a girl."

Zeff looks like he's barely holding himself back from breaking Sanji's skull anew (probably just because they're at the doctor's office, and Zeff would just have to pay for new stitches). Sanji has no such compunctions, and is about to put his foot through Zeff's head when the doctor breezes back in.  
    
"Found something," she says airily, and she pushes Sanji back onto the table, turns his head this way and that as she wraps it up.

Sanji thanks her profusely, and he gets a quiver in his belly and his knees when he shakes her hand-- _touches_ her hand. She smiles brightly at him and says, "Take it easy, Sanji."

"I will," he promises her fervently, and when Zeff drags him bodily (and more roughly than needed, probably) from the room, he smiles back at the doctor, waves at her stupidly.

Zeff mutters darkly in the car on the ride home, and Sanji leans his head against the window, looks out at the other cars, and wonders if the doctor wears those black-rimmed glasses all the time.  
    
"Sanji," Zeff suddenly says, when they're a block away from the restaurant. "You know."

"What?" Sanji asks a little warily, because Zeff has been fucking weird for the past week or two, ever since Sanji got brained with a tire iron.

"If you--" Zeff clears his throat, clenches the steering wheel until it creaks beneath his hands. "I don't. So the restaurant."  
    
"The fuck?"  
    
"So we don't care. If you are."

"Okay," Sanji says slowly, because he doesn't really know what Zeff is saying, and he doesn't _want_ to know. Because he doesn't want options, and doesn't want to think about things--like that. Or anything, really. "Thanks, then."

As soon as Zeff pulls into the alleyway next to the restaurant, Sanji jumps out of the car, cutting through the storage room instead of the panicked kitchen and taking the stairs, two at a time, up to his room.  
    
When he gets to his room, he pulls out his phone, and texts Tilda, _want to see a movie before coffee?_

In economics on Friday, Usopp sits way down in the front of the class, and Sanji stares at Usopp's stupid fro the entire time. As soon as class is over, Sanji grabs his bag and vaults over his table, then pushes his way to the aisle. A few girls giggle, and a couple of guys curse at him, and he smiles at the girls, flips the dicks off. Then he grabs Usopp's shoulder as Usopp starts to stand up, and shoves Usopp back down into the chair hard enough that Usopp makes a noise of pain.  
    
"We," he says, and Usopp looks like he's going to cry and scream bloody murder, "are going to finish that fucking report. Right now."

"R-right," Usopp says, and his eyes flicker over Sanji's shoulder. Sanji glances over, and when he sees the professor frowning at them (or rather, at _him_ , because he's the one bullying another student, on the _front row_ ), Sanji lets go of Usopp's shoulder and holds out his hand.

"Come on, then," he snaps, and he yanks Usopp to his feet, then lets go of Usopp's hand. Usopp's palm was sweaty, and Sanji has to rub his hand against his trousers to dry his own palm. Stupid, stupid kid--  
    
They find an empty study room in the library, and Sanji throws his stuff onto the table, takes the comfiest looking chair. Usopp sits down in the chair furthest away from Sanji's and looks at Sanji like Sanji has threatened to beat him to death with a brick or something.

"What?" Sanji asks sharply. "What the fuck has your shitty panties in such a knot?"

Usopp looks away, mutters, "Nothing."

They don't really get much done. Every time Sanji looks up, he catches Usopp staring at him, and whenever he reaches across the table to point something out, Usopp practically leaps away from the table. Finally, when his patience has _snapped_ , he yells, "What the fuck is your problem? Or I swear, I will fucking beat your skull in."  
    
Usopp looks really torn at that, like he doesn't know whether or not to try to flee, and Sanji tries to take a few deep, calming breaths.  
    
They don't help.

"Um."  
    
" _What_?"

"Uh, I just. I'm sorry. About, uh." Usopp swallows, loud enough that Sanji can hear it, and he's fisting up the papers in front of him. Their _report_. "Sorry that I tried to, uh, kiss you."  
    
That rushing, roaring sound, Sanji realizes a few moments later, is the sound of the blood in his ears.

The cracking, splintering sound, he realizes right afterwards, is the sound of his pen shattering in his grip.  
   
Usopp must've seen Sanji's face (or, you know, the shattering pen), because before Sanji can even start to get up, or yell, or anything, Usopp is tearing out of the study room, leaping over the table (and Sanji) with surprising dexterity.  
   
Sanji looks at the crumpled report lying on the table, and Usopp's bag, abandoned under Usopp's chair, and his hand, which is dripping ink onto his brand new jeans. Then he lies his head down on the table and curses until he doesn't feel like he's going to kick a hole through the universe.

It's probably just Gin's bad luck that has him lurking out in the middle of the quad, but Sanji sees him, and whatever festering rage Sanji had squashed down while salvaging what he could of their report comes bubbling up.  
    
"Hey," Gin says, and Sanji swipes his legs out from under him, sending Gin crashing to the ground.

"Fuck you," Sanji says, which is a nicer greeting than he really wants to say, but even he has manners (even if they had to be beaten into him by Zeff).  
    
Gin doesn't say anything, or even move; just stares up at Sanji. When Sanji glowers down at him, Gin finally says, "Are you done?"  
    
"Yeah, whatever."

Gin follows Sanji home, just walking right next to Sanji, maybe half a step behind. Sanji tries to ignore him, and Gin doesn't say anything, and they get a lot of weird looks from passersby; probably because Gin looks like a fucking punk.

When they reach the restaurant, Sanji just keeps walking, and Gin keeps following him. On, and on, block after block, until Sanji finally turns into an alleyway and Gin follows him. Sanji stops, and Gin stops next to him, and Sanji asks, "What do you want, then?"

"Nothing," Gin says, and Sanji scoffs. "Not much," Gin amends, like that's any better.

"You keep fucking up my life," Sanji snaps, and he kicks an old forgotten cardboard box, probably some homeless man's house. It bends under his foot, tears along the edge, and collapses in on itself, crumpling under its weight.  
    
Gin doesn't say anything, but he does kinda shift, and Sanji turns to glare at him.

"What, are you some kind of-- Some kind of faggot? Are you gay?" He swallows down the rising feeling in his throat. If Zeff heard him, Zeff would probably beat the shit of him. "Why do you keep fucking _following me around_?"  
    
And, wow, it's like bad deja vu from Tuesday night; Gin lunges forward before Sanji has even finished talking, and he grabs Sanji, slams him up against the bricks. Sanji's head hits the bricks with a resounding _thud_ that echoes in between his ears, and he's pretty sure if his head gets whacked anymore, he's going to get pretty severe brain trauma.

Then Gin is kissing him, harsh and brutal, and Sanji is scrambling at the wall behind him with his fingertips; his fingernails are tearing away, and he thinks he can feel blood on his fingertips, hot and wet.  
   
This is--beyond deja vu, really. This is brutal, and Gin has a strength Usopp couldn't dream of. Gin's mouth is heavy and hot on his, and then Gin is trying to shove his tongue into Sanji's mouth, and if he actually gets it in, Sanji is going to _bite it off_. Or--he wants to, but he thinks he might've hit his head a little harder than he thought, because all he can do is try to claw his way backwards through the wall behind him. His legs feel like they're shaking (like when he was nine and ten and eleven, and the smallest kid on the playground; long before Zeff picked him up), and he wants to put his knee through Gin's gut.

So he digs his fingers into the brick, feels blood slick his hands, and, with that little bit of stability, does so.  
Gin stumbles back, but he doesn't let go of Sanji's shoulders, so Sanji is pulled with him. Sanji slams one arm up against Gin's wrist, hears a popping sound, and twists back against Gin's other hand. When Gin tries to pull him back, Sanji turns, twists at his hips, and kicks the point of his right shoe into where he's pretty sure a vital organ or two reside.  
   
That's when Gin goes down with a crash, right into the garbage strewn across the alley floor. Sanji takes a shuddering breath, and tries to tell his heart to stop trying to beat out of his chest, and his hands to stop shaking, and his knees to stop threatening to crumple beneath him.

"Are you done?" he asks when he thinks his voice won't be shaking too much. He pokes the toe of his shoe into Gin's side, right where a huge bruise has to be growing, and he digs it in a little, enough to equal the blood welling up underneath Sanji's torn fingernails (the rest, he thinks, he'll never be able to find equal for; the absolute _fear_ that he hasn't felt for ten, eleven, twelve years).  
    
"Yeah," Gin says in a rasp, and he doesn't try to move from the digging of Sanji's shoe; he just lies there, staring at the garbage. Then he says, "I'm sorry."

Sanji kicks him, neatly and precisely, right into the bruise, and says, "Don't fucking follow me ever again. I'm done with you."  
    
Then he walks home, his bag slung over his shoulder, his hands shoved into his pockets. He hopes his face isn't too red, or his hair too messy. That his mouth isn't kiss-bruised.

When he reaches the restaurant, he sneaks a look into the big mirrored windows, and scrubs at his face, shakes out his hair so it looks wind-tossled; then he slouches, shoves his hands into his pockets, and comes in through the restaurant.

"Sanji," a host says, and Sanji slinks past him, ducks through the partition into the dining area. He meanders between the tables, looks at all the people eating. Couples, lots of couples; a few families. When he goes through the doors into the kitchen, Patty looks up from some hideous concoction of a pastry, and Patty's face goes very, very still. Then Patty yells, "Boss!"  
    
Sanji fights down a shudder, shrugs his shoulders to hitch his bag back up. He digs his hands further into his pockets, and goes upstairs to the bathroom so he can wash his hands.

He washes his hands in cold water, digging the crusted blood out from under his fingernails. Some of the nails are torn half off, and others are bent; he bites at the broken ones, tears off what's left, and winces as each one comes off. Then he washes his hands again, and dries his hands on the oldest towel he can find in the bathroom, where the bloodstains won't make Zeff bitch about what the nonexistent guests will think.

He washes his face, scrubs until his whole face is raw and red, and then he throws water on his hair, scrapes it back from his face with his stinging fingers. When he looks in the mirror, he doesn't look that much different than he did after every fight in middle school and high school; angry and red and scraped up. A little older, maybe, and a little wiser, but still the smallest kid on the playground.

Zeff is sitting in Sanji's room.  
    
Sanji drops his bag next to the door and toes off his shoes, shoving them next to the bag with his socked feet. Then he stands in the center of his room, halfway between the window and the door, two arm lengths from Zeff.

"What happened?" Zeff asks, and Sanji makes a show of rolling his eyes.  
    
"Nothing," he says. When Zeff shifts, Sanji says, "I just got in a fight."

"With who? Some punk?" Then Zeff's face darkens, and fuck, Sanji doesn't think he's seen Zeff this angry for a long, long time. "That punk that keeps following you around?"

"No," Sanji tries to lie, then he says, "He didn't. He didn't hurt me."  
    
"You hurt yourself?" Zeff asks, like he thinks he's some fucking psychiatrist or some kind of shit like that, and Sanji clenches his hands into fists, asks, "What the fuck do you want, Zeff?"

"Nothing." Zeff sighs when he stands up, like an old man, and he walks slowly and heavily to the door. When he's leaving, he says, not looking at Sanji, "I want you with the line chefs tonight."  
    
When he closes the door, Sanji grabs the closest thing (his biology book) and throws it at the door, and listens to the door crack.

He's in a foul mood all night, and Zeff seems to be in an equally foul mood. The line chefs figure it out pretty quick, and put Sanji first, so he can't criticize everything they do (and throw every wrong plate at their fucking ugly skulls). Sanji sets up the plates furiously, and sometimes, when there's a lull and he has a moment, he has to grip the counter and put his head down, and take two or three deep breaths so he doesn't fucking _scream_.

Zeff doesn't seem to have any such compunctions. He yells at everyone except Sanji; screams about the meat being practically raw and there being too many vegetables in the soup. About the plates and the bowls and everything he sees.  
    
But he doesn't yell at Sanji-- doesn't even look at Sanji. Just glosses right over Sanji, and yells at the rest of the line chefs by name, tearing apart everything they do.

By the end of the night, half of the kitchen has threatened to quit and Zeff has retired with a powerful fury to his office, where they can hear him screaming at who are probably their vendors over the phone.  
    
Patty corners Sanji near the sinks where Sanji is yelling at the dishboys; Patty's face still looks still, his mouth a stiff line cutting across the width of his face.

"You have a bite mark," Patty says, and he points at his own mouth, at the corner of his lower lip. "Right here."

Sanji can feel the blood just explode in his face and neck, and he clenches his fists, wishes he could sink right into the floor. He swallows, opens his mouth to say something, then closes it. Licks at the corner of his mouth, and tastes blood.

Patty slaps Sanji on the back then, a meaty thump that nearly throws Sanji off his feet, and says, in a cheerful voice, "I've got a shovel."  
   
His face, though, is still, and his mouth is a line, and his eyes, when Sanji looks, look like Zeff's.

"Shit," Sanji says, because he doesn't know what else to say (doesn't know what else to do, because what do you do when there is something wrong, but the absence of--and he doesn't even know what). 

Patty slaps his back again, hard enough to bruise, and says, "Get back to work, kid."

Sanji does half of his share, then leaves the rest to the terrified dishboys. He heads up to his room, then detours to the bathroom, and turns on the light. He leans up against the sink, the edge digging into his thighs, and puts his face close to the mirror; looks, and.

The bite mark curves with the edge of his lip, right in the corner. When he opens his mouth, he can see blood-bruises on the inside of his mouth, and he touches them with his finger, presses until it hurts. Lets up, then pushes again.

Then he brushes his teeth, once and twice and three times, and flosses; spits the blood that wells up from his gums. Looks at the bite in the corner of his mouth again, and scrapes what's left of his fingernails across it until it's just a long scrape.

When he goes to sleep that night, he pulls a pillow over his head so he won't be able to hear Zeff argue with Patty downstairs.

He sleeps in until noon; when he finally wakes up, he can hear the lunch staff clattering around downstairs. He rolls over onto his side and stares at the wall for a while. Rolls over onto his other side, and looks at where he left his bag next to his door. When he finally drags himself out of bed, he grabs his phone and sits down on the floor, hunched over and sleepy.

He texts Tilda first: _sorry, have to work evening shift. next time?_ Then he texts Usopp: _if your ass isn't here in an hour, I'll fucking kill you_. Then he thinks about it, and sends another text: _I'll beat the shit out of you. hurry up._

He takes a shower, scrubs at his hair and his skin, and the water stings when it lands on his sore, bloody fingertips. Then he gets dressed, his oldest pair of jeans, a shirt from high school; he sits at the top of the stairs, and stares at his toes, wonders why humans have toes. Wonders if he could walk without toes--if it would hurt, if he cut off Gin's toes one a time; if it would hurt enough.

"Sanji!" someone yells from downstairs. Tibo's face pokes around the corner downstairs, and he says, "Someone's here to see you."

Thirty-seven minutes, then. Sanji flexes his toes and wonders if Usopp ran the whole way here. He wanders downstairs barefoot, and through the kitchen; everyone starts yelling at him, shit about health and hazards and fucking _standards_ , don't you fucking _get it_ , Sanji?!  
    
Yeah, he gets it, so he flexes his toes against the cold kitchen floor and opens up the side door. Usopp looks at him, looks away, and says, "Uh, I'm here."  
   
"Come on, then," Sanji says, and he leads Usopp back upstairs. He wonders if Zeff is watching from his office.

"I left your bag at the reference desk," Sanji says, and Usopp says, "Oh. Yeah. They called me."  
    
"Good."

Sanji sits on his bed, leaning back on his hands, and Usopp stands in the middle of Sanji's room, halfway between the door and the window, two arm lengths from Sanji. Sanji wonders if Usopp is hurting, too; if his fingernails are torn and broken like Sanji's. Wonders when he got so stupidly poetic, like a twelve year old girl. Fuck.  
    
"You're gay?" he asks suddenly, and deja vu, deja vu. He blinks, fists his hands in the blankets of his unmade bed.  
    
Usopp gets that scared rabbit look again, like he's about to run for his life.

"Fuck," Sanji snaps, because that look pisses him off. _Everything_ about Usopp pisses him off. "I'm not going to fucking kill you, you little shit. I just want to know. God. If I wanted to beat the shit out of you, I would've done it already." Then he remembers all of Zeff's painful lessons about etiquette and manners, and adds, "Usopp."

That doesn't make Usopp look any less scared, but he stops actively leaning towards the door.  
    
"Not-- Not really." Usopp clears his throat, and Sanji wonders what the hell _not really_ can mean. "I mean, I sometimes-- But not usually."

Sanji thinks about that for a minute, tries to wrap his head around it. Mostly fails, and can only ask, "Do you just like me because of my clothes?"  
    
"I-- _What_?!"  
   
"Because yours are shit," he adds offhandedly, and Usopp makes a little noise. "So what, you're fucking gay for me?"

Usopp makes another little noise, and starts actively leaning towards the door again. Sanji grins up at the ceiling, leans further back on his hands, and says, "So what, you want to fuck or what?"

"I-- _What_?!"  
    
Yeah, deja vu.  
   
"Lock the fucking door, Usopp."

Usopp does so, fumbling the whole time. It takes him two, maybe three tries to lock the door, and Sanji watches him, gripping the blankets beneath him with white knuckles. When Usopp turns back around, he look everywhere but at Sanji, and Sanji has to swallow, fight back the urge to tell Usopp to get the fuck out.  
    
"Come on, then," he finally forces out, and his voice is ragged. He sits up a little straighter on the bed, scoots back, and pats the bed. Feels like an absolute idiot as soon as he does, because what are they, fucking teenagers?

Usopp shuffles forward, like he's completely unwilling, and Sanji has to look at the wall behind Usopp so he doesn't have to see Usopp's face.  
    
When Usopp sits on the very edge of the bed, teetering like he's about to fall off, Sanji pulls in his legs, then leans forward over his knees, puts his face close to Usopp's.

"What the fuck do you want, then?"  
 

Usopp licks his lips, and Sanji looks down, watches. Feels the pit of his stomach fall away, and doesn't know if it's arousal or fear or disgust, or some mix of all three.  
    
Sanji mirrors Usopp, licks his lips, the bite in the corner of his mouth. Usopp breathes in, a jagged sound, and his adam's apple bobs in his throat. Sanji leans a fraction of an inch closer, and asks, "What did you want to do on Tuesday?"

That's when Usopp kisses him; grabs Sanji's arms above the elbows and bends Sanji back and follows him down, pushes him to the bed and kisses him. Usopp is as forceful as Gin--his grip is just as tight. Sanji turns his head a little to the right, and Usopp's mouth is on the corner of Sanji's mouth, opposite of the bitemark. Sanji swallows, and Usopp's hands tighten on his arms, and then Usopp tries to force his tongue into Sanji's mouth.

Sanji flinches back, turning his face further away, and Usopp flinches back like he was shot. His mouth is wet, and his eyes are wide; he looks at Sanji with that same betrayed he had a week and a half ago.  
    
"Why-- I'm sorry," Usopp says, and he's teetering, then falling off the edge of the bed. He lands on the floor in a loud thump, and Sanji wonders if Zeff can hear them from his office. "I didn't-- Why did you."

Sanji pinches his mouth into a thin line, scowls at the rumples of his unmade bed.  
    
"Why _did_ you?" Usopp asks, and Sanji says, roughly, "Again."

"No." Usopp sounds like he's about to panic. "I won't-- Why are you doing this?"  
      
"Fuck," Sanji growls, "just get the fuck up here already."

Usopp shakes his head, doing that ugly crab-like scuttle backwards again, and Sanji lunges off his bed, slams full-body into Usopp. They both go down, limbs tangled together, and Sanji kisses Usopp clumsily on the mouth, hard and unyielding.

Usopp's whole body stiffens beneath him, like a rock or the ground itself, and Sanji twists the fabric of Usopp's hoodie in his hands. He kisses harder, and harder, and finally Usopp sinks, mouth opening just a little. Sanji pulls back a little, and Usopp's mouth opens a little more; Sanji licks the inside of his lips, then Usopp's, and Usopp groans beneath him.

His eyes are still open, stupidly round and staring up at Sanji, and Sanji finally has to close his eyes, because he really can't stand to look at Usopp like this. And finally, finally, Usopp starts to kiss Sanji back.

When he grabs at the hem of Usopp's hoodie and starts to pull it up, Usopp pulls it up with him, twisting to get it up around his shoulders, then lifting his arms as Sanji pulls back so Sanji can yank it over his head. Sanji grabs at his own shirt, pulls it off, and when he looks down, Usopp's staring at a spot just beneath Sanji's ribs.

"You're thin," Usopp says like an idiot, and he touches Sanji's side, lays a finger against Sanji's ribs. "I can see all of your ribs."  
    
Sanji shudders against the touch, and has to press the palms of his hands against the floor on either of Usopp. "Idiot," he says, and he stares at the carpet next to Usopp's ear, because he can't look at Usopp's face.  
   
"But," Usopp tries to argue, and Sanji snaps, "Fuck, just shut _up_ already."

He doesn't want to touch Usopp's skin, doesn't want to see Usopp's body. When Usopp tries to drag off his own shirt, Sanji grabs at it, pulls it back down, and Usopp looks stupidly hurt. Sanji scowls and kisses Usopp, and it takes a long time for Usopp to start kissing him back again.

This is all too much work; too hard, too difficult. Too fucking stupid.

He smooths his fingers along the hem of Usopp's shirt, feels the heat of Usopp's stomach beneath it. Then he drags his fingers down, just a little, and grabs at the top of Usopp's jeans, feels the curve of the button press against the fat of his thumb.

"Why," Usopp repeats against Sanji's mouth, over and over, and Sanji bites Usopp's mouth, his upper lip, then his lower one. When Usopp grabs at Sanji's hands, Sanji shakes them off, then peels open Usopp's jeans, pulls the zipper down. When he reaches in, he can feel the heat of Usopp's cock, half-hard against his wrist.

He pulls away from Usopp's mouth, sitting back on his heels. He's straddling Usopp's thighs, and when he looks down, he can see Usopp's cock, flush and thickening in his hand. Usopp makes a strangled sound in his throat, and Sanji grips a little more tightly, twists his wrist. Watches his fist close over the top of Usopp's hardening cock.  
    
"How is it?" Sanji asks, and when Usopp makes another strangled noise, Sanji says, "Tell me you like it.”

“I--” Usopp grabs onto Sanji’s wrist, but he doesn’t try to stop him. Just holds on as Sanji starts to pull him off, short, quick jerks. “I like it-- Sanji, Sanji.”  
    
"Shut _up_ ," he says, and he says, "Tell me this is okay, tell me--"  
   
"Sanji," Usopp says, and it figures that he's a fucking talker. "Sanji-- You, too," and he tries to grab for Sanji's jeans, one long finger catching on the waistband, hooking over.  
    
"Don't," Sanji says, but Usopp is already yanking Sanji's trousers open, and then Usopp is saying, "You're not hard."  
   
"You're not," Usopp repeats again, like Sanji wouldn't be aware of his own condition-- _or fucking lack thereof_ , the little _fucktard_. "You're not--"  
    
Then they're tussling, because Sanji's still got a hand on Usopp's cock, and Usopp is trying to push Sanji off, and Usopp is saying fucking stupid things, like, "You bastard, you _bastard_ , you didn't even want--"  
   
So Sanji grabs the back of Usopp's head, fists his hand in Usopp's curly hair, and slams Usopp's head against the floor, hard enough to daze Usopp. Usopp goes limp, and his mouth moves quietly, like he's still trying to cuss Sanji out.  
   
Sanji stretches along the length of Usopp's back, fits himself in close, and Usopp shudders, makes a noise when Sanji breathes on his neck. Usopp's still hard, and like this, Usopp pressed back against Sanji's chest, it's almost like jerking himself off; he wraps an arm around Usopp's stomach, and another around Usopp's cock, and lies his face against the knob at the nape of Usopp's neck.  
    
Usopp's hair tickles Sanji's face, gets caught in Sanji's eyelashes, and Sanji closes his eyes, and breathes hard, and says, over and over, "Tell me this is okay. Tell me, Usopp, okay? Usopp?"

When Usopp comes, he digs his short fingernails into Sanji's neck, and shakes a little. Usopp's breathing is heavy, too, and Sanji can feel the frantic rise and fall of Usopp's chest; can hear the wheeze of air from Usopp's lungs. He jerks Usopp's cock once, twice more as it softens, then wipes Usopp's come off onto Usopp's shirt, then his own stomach, trying to get it out of the creases of his palm and fingers. It's sticky and warm, but it's cooling fast on his skin  
    
He's starting to feel sick.  
    
"Usopp?"

"Let go of me." Usopp twists a little, then goes still again. "Let go of me, Sanji."

Sanji pulls back his arms, sitting and scooting back. As soon as he's not touching Usopp, Usopp clambers to his feet, fumbling at his jeans. Usopp looks back at Sanji, then looks away, says in a very tight voice, "Where's my hoodie?"

It's crumpled on the bed, and Sanji stretches over to grab it, rising up onto his knees so he can reach it. He holds it out and Usopp grabs it, yanks it on. Then Usopp punches Sanji in the face and Sanji goes with it, lets Usopp's fist send him reeling against the bed.  
    
Usopp hits--hard. Harder than Sanji ever thought he could. More like a man, less like a kid. Sanji swallows down the rising of his throat, breathes through his clenched teeth.

Usopp grabs his bag and Sanji says, "I'll do the report. So you don't have to come back."

"Fine." Usopp digs through his bag, then just turns it upside down, dumping everything out on Sanji's floor. Books and papers go everywhere, pens and pencils and a set of keys. Usopp grabs the keys, then leaves, slamming the door hard enough that the frame shakes.  
   
Sanji licks his lips, tastes the bite in the corner of his mouth. Looks at the pile of shit Usopp just dumped on his floor, and licks his lips again. Then he crawls up onto his bed, buries his face into his pillow, and closes his eyes.

It's not even twenty minutes later when his phone starts buzzing angrily. When he looks, it's a text from Zoro, and it says, _what the fuck did you do_

The lack of punctuation leaves Sanji a little bewildered. Then he remembers that, oh shit, Usopp and Zoro know each other, and that Usopp and Luffy are friends, and fucking hell, Luffy is coming back in a few weeks. He licks his lips, then runs for the bathroom, where he throws up into the toilet messily.  
    
He's still holding his phone, hard enough that it's putting lines in his skin, and he leans back against the bathtub, so the porcelain rests cool against his cheek, and looks at the text again.

 _nothing, Why?_ he finally sends back, and a few seconds later, Zoro texts, _what did you do, sanji_  
   
So then he throws the phone against the wall, and watches it shatter into three magnificent pieces. Then realizes that he just broke his _fucking phone_ , and Zeff is going to _kill him_. If, you know, Zoro and Luffy don't beat him to it. And oh, shit, just thinking about Luffy makes Sanji feel pretty sick to his stomach again.

He gets up and nudges the pieces of the phone with his toe, then strips off his jeans and crawls into the bathtub to take another shower, and try to get the smell of Usopp off of him.

He's hiding in the kitchen when Zoro comes to find him on Sunday. Zeff has been watching him with something almost like concern, and when Zoro shows up, Zeff frowns more than usual; Sanji looks toward the door, and wonders if any of the chefs will try to hold Zoro off he makes a run for it.

Then Zeff says, "You can go, Sanji," and Zeff is such a _traitor_.  
    
He tells Zeff as much, and Zeff just stares at him as he leaves, following an ominous looking Zoro.

Zoro leads Sanji deeper into the alleyway, where no one where hear his screams; Sanji looks up at where he can see a narrow slit of sky between the roofs of the buildings and wonders why everyone tries to kill him in alleyways.  
    
"I ran into Usopp yesterday," Zoro says, and Sanji says, "I didn't mean to."

And, he realizes, it's true; mostly true. He didn't really, but he did, and yeah, he shouldn't try to excuse shit, but fuck. He didn't mean to.

"Yeah?" Zoro asks, and he's frowning at all the garbage around him, like he's trying to decide which would be the best to beat Sanji to death with. And really, Sanji can't really blame him-- but that doesn't mean he's not looking for his own improvised kill-Zoro-in-self-defense weapon. The big wooden crate is looking better by the second. "What did you do?"

And fuck, that's a loaded question. Sanji licks his lips, looks around. The end of alleyway's pretty far away, and yeah, no one's gonna hear his screams.  
    
"He didn't say no," he finally says.  
    
And _fuck_ , he forgot how fast Zoro can move, because Zoro has the collar of Sanji's shirt all bunched up in his grip, and Sanji can't breathe. "What did you _do_?"

"I didn't-- _Fuck_ , he didn't say no, so stop _fucking choking me_."  
    
Zoro lets go of his collar and Sanji takes a big step backward, rubbing at his throat. It stings, and by now, Sanji is feeling pretty fucking hammered, between Gin, Usopp, and Zoro.  
   
"You know what," Zoro says, "I don't care. I don't want to know. Just fucking fix it before Luffy gets home."

"Right," Sanji says. Then he swallows and says, "You're not going to tell him, are you?"

Zoro looks at Sanji and kinda smiles, and the fucking _bastard_. "No, but Usopp might."  
    
And yeah, Sanji's pretty fucking screwed at this point. He nods, then says, "Do you want something to eat? Zeff did the soup today."

"Nah, I've got to go." Zoro starts walking back towards the street, and Sanji kinda starts to follow him, then stops.

"If I," he says when Zoro's about ten feet away, which means Sanji's got pretty good odds in his favor, "said I fucked him up pretty bad--" He licks his lips again, wishes desperately for a cigarette. "What would you do?"  
    
Zoro stops, but he doesn't turn back. Just sorta looks up at the sky, like he's talking to a cloud, or something. "Beat the shit out of you, probably."

"Right. 'kay, then."  
    
"Right."

Sanji points out which street Zoro needs to take, and Zoro keeps _not_ looking at Sanji, like he can't really stand to look at Sanji. Then Zoro finally does, when Sanji is trying to explain the difference between second north and second south to the directionally challenged, and Zoro says, "You're pretty fucked up, aren't you?"  
   
And yeah, he keeps saying all this fucking shit that Sanji can't _answer_. So Sanji says, "I fucked him. He _didn't say no_."

That's when Zoro beats the shit out of him, three feet from the street and in full view of the restaurant. Sanji's on the ground, his arms curled up around the back of his head so he doesn't crack his skull open again, and Zoro's sitting on Sanji's chest, pummeling Sanji's face. And yeah, Sanji's probably pretty fucked up, because he can't bother to try to push Zoro off, or even shield his face.  
    
He's just felt his nose give with a crunch when Zeff comes out of the kitchen, wielding a meat cleaver the length of his forearm.

" _Punk_ ," Zeff roars like a battle cry, and Zoro takes one last punch, splitting Sanji's lip _again_ , then takes off like a shot.

Zeff doesn't help Sanji to his feet. Instead, he just stands there, wielding his meat cleaver, like a sentinel or something, as Sanji slowly sits up, blood dripping from his face. When Sanji stands up, and staggers a little to the side, Zeff steps forward, lets Sanji stagger into him. Zeff is huge and solid, a rock wall, and Sanji leans against him for a moment while his vision leaps in his eyes. When he pulls back, there is blood smeared all over Zeff's chef's coat. They must, he thinks, look pretty fucking badass to all the passersby.  
    
Or at least, he amends as he staggers into the kitchen, Zeff must look pretty badass.  
   
Carne and Zeff both look over his face and mutter ominous things like, “Think it'll close up?" and "Probably stay crooked," and "Well, what doesn't kill him--"  
    
Finally, Zeff says, "If you think I'm taking you to the hospital, you got hit harder than I thought. Go get cleaned up, and get back down here to work."

So Sanji steals the first aid kit hidden in Zeff's office, the one kept for all the angry old men who use huge meat cleavers for a living, and staggers upstairs, where he sits on the floor of the bathroom with a tiny little mirror, trying to bandage his own fucking face. Fuckers.

Then he goes downstairs, and tries not to drip blood into anyone's food until Zeff finally gets sick of the sight of him and sends him away again.

He stays up until four getting the report done. Usopp's handwriting is terrible, looks like shitty chicken scratches, and there's still a lot to do. A powerpoint, and an actual typed report--he even makes a fucking flowchart, and if this doesn't get them an A, then nothing will, not even sucking the teacher's cock. By the time he's done with it, fucking hell, his eyes are so fucking swollen he can barely see, and his lip feels like it's bigger than his chin.  
    
He crawls into bed, and pulls the blankets over his head, and what feels like ten minutes later, his alarm goes off, and he has to go to school.

He picks his clothes carefully: sleek slacks, a shirt with the most delicate of pinstripes. A black vest and tie, same shade as his slacks. He slips on his leather-soled shoes and ties the laces, tiny little knots, then grabs his bag and heads for school.

He fucks up the report fifty times while trying to print and laminate and bind; by the time he's got it done, he owes the copy center twenty fucking bucks, and everyone at the copy center is giving him the evil eye. He tries to scowl back at them, but the scabs on his lips just split when he does, and then he has to bend over awkward so his blood falls all over the floor and not on his clothes.  
    
Fucking hell.

He drags himself to his first class and lurks in the backmost corner; as soon as roll has been taken, he lies his head down and pretends to sleep, and mostly just keeps licking the blood on his lip away, again and again. By the time class ends, he feels sick from the taste and feel of blood in his mouth and stomach. Then he has to go to economics, and yeah, that pretty much is the highlight of his shit-tastic day.

He looks in through the door's window in the back, and Usopp's already there, a fro'd head sitting up in the front row again. Sanji curses, then tromps down to the front row, and squeezes in past all the seats until he's standing next to Usopp.  
    
"Move," he says the kid sitting next to Usopp, and the kid looks up at Sanji like he's crazy.

"Fucking _move_ ," he snaps, "before I beat the shit out of you," and the kid grabs his stuff and beats it. Sanji yanks back the chair, then throws himself down into it.

Usopp is staring at him, and when Sanji looks at him, gives him a mean smile, Usopp winces.  
    
"Your face," Usopp says, like Sanji wouldn't realize that _his entire fucking face looks like hell_ , and Sanji says, "Yeah, well, some of us have got friends in pretty high places, huh."  
    
Usopp's face hardens and turns away, and Sanji huffs, feeling like a teenaged girl. He digs through his bag for the stupid report, and when he finds it, he throws it in front of Usopp, says, "Here, the fucking report's done."

Usopp doesn't say anything else, but he keeps look at Sanji throughout class. When the class finally ends, Usopp asks, "Was it Zoro?"

"Yeah, well, I beat the shit out of him," Sanji lies, and Usopp grabs his stuff, gets up to leave. Sanji looks up at him, then says, sharply, "You didn't say no."

Usopp mumbles something that could be _shut up_ or _fuck you_ or even _you're right, I apologize_. It's probably something like _go die in a fire,_ though. Either way, Sanji can't hear it, and before he can bitch Usopp out for mumbling, Usopp grabs the report and makes a beeline for the professor, who's giving Sanji a dirty look, like Sanji's doing all the world a great disservice by being alive, let alone _coming to class_.  
   
Sanji takes his things, goes outside, and sits about three feet in front of the building and smokes like a furnace, blowing each mouthful of smoke towards the building. Everyone scowls at him as they pass by, and sometimes he blows the smoke at them, too, if it's all guys and there aren't any girls in the line of fire.

That's where Tilda finds him, with her big, fat red curls and her slim little fingers. She sits next to him, holding a binder on her lap, and says, "What happened to your face?"  
    
He stamps out the cigarette on his other side, and smiles at her, says, "Oh, nothing. Got in a fight with a friend."

They're making plans for the weekend, coffee and a movie and whatever else he can think of that will just keep her next to him, pretty and bright and with those perfect tits, when Usopp comes out of the building.

Usopp looks at them, and they look at Usopp, and then Usopp goes down the furthest end of the stairs away from Sanji. Tilda makes a little humming noise, then asks, "Is he your friend?"

"Classmate," Sanji says. He desperately wants anything cigarette; maybe a drink. "Funny face, right?"  
    
"Maybe," Tilda says, and she laughs with him, and touches his swollen face gently with her pretty little fingers.

When he gets home, Zeff comes out of the office and bitches at him about never answering his phone, and Sanji, stupid with happiness from being touched by Tilda, lets slip that he broke his phone. Zeff cuffs his head, and just like that, Sanji's back in this shitty world. He bitches right back, and when Zeff starts yelling at him to get his fucking act together, Sanji grabs a big, heavy plate, and throws it at Zeff.

Zeff ducks, and the plate shatters against the wall right by Zeff's head. And then Sanji realizes what he just did, and he's never really thrown anything _at Zeff_ before. At the door, yeah, and sometimes the wall, but never _at Zeff_. And the entire kitchen is dead silent, everyone watching.

"Get out," Zeff says, and Sanji turns around and walks back out.

He ends up at Zoro's apartment because he doesn't have any other friends. Probably doesn't even have _any_ friends. Zoro's someone to eat lunch with and complain with; it doesn't mean Sanji likes him, or that Zoro likes Sanji.

When Zoro opens the door, he looks at Sanji's face, then says, "Your face looks pretty bad."  
    
And that really, really pisses Sanji off. He shoves Zoro out of the way so he can get into the apartment and mutters, "I don't want you telling me that." Sanji tosses his bag onto Zoro's couch, then throws himself down next to it, kicking his feet over the armrest.  
    
"I'm staying here for a while," he announces, and Zoro says, "You have to cook, then."

"Yeah, fine, whatever." Sanji closes his eyes, sinks back into the couch, and when Zoro kicks his foot, he sighs.  
    
"Dinner," Zoro says, and Sanji says, "Yeah, whatever you say, princess."

Then, when he opens up the fridge, says, "Fuck, don't you have _anything_?"

They make an impromptu run to a nearby market; meat, vegetables, milk. Eggs. Sanji spends a while in the spices section, trying to decide how much he can con Zoro into buying. When they finally leave, they're both loaded down with bags, and Sanji is whistling cheerfully, because he loves cooking in any kitchen Zeff isn't in charge of.

When they get back, Sanji takes over the kitchen and sets Zoro to washing the piles of dirty dishes as he peels and cuts and slices. He makes pasta, because it's cheap and easy and he's not Zoro's bitch. Then he caves a little, and makes a spice cake with the spices he'd snuck into the cart back at the market.

After dinner, Sanji goes to steal some blankets from Zoro's closet, and some clothes from his dresser, and a pillow from his bed. He makes up a bed on the couch, then kicks Zoro to his bedroom so he can sleep.

Then he lies on his side and watches the light of the smoke detector blink in the dark.  
   
He doesn't bother going to school the next day; he doesn't have the right books or folders, and he doesn't have any clean clothes, anyway. Instead, he makes waffles and bacon muffins, then complains about Zoro's completely unsanitary apartment.

He starts washing everything, bitching as he goes through the apartment, and Zoro just kinda follows behind, watching Sanji and sometimes saying, "Yeah, yeah, whatever."

Zoro leaves for work just before noon; he works at a gym downtown, where office ladies and trophy wives go to tighten their asses. Sanji's sure that the perks of the job are completely lost on Zoro. Zoro's too easy going and just plain _dumb_ , and he's not much more than a glorified ad for the gym: _come here, and you can look like him_. Or, for the ladies: _come here, and maybe you can get into his trousers._

So, yeah, Sanji might be a little jealous, but whatever, they've all got their gifts, right? And Zoro just happens to have the gift of brawn over brains.  
    
By the time Zoro gets back, Sanji's cleaned the whole apartment, and has washed all the sheets and blankets _he's_ using. He's not going to spend his money washing _Zoro's_ shit at the laundromat, but he's not going to spend another night sleeping on someone's dirty sheets. Fuck, that's nasty.  
    
He's just remaking his bed on the couch when Zoro comes in, and when Sanji looks at Zoro, Zoro looks back, looking confused and a little stupid. Well, stupider than usual.

"What?" Sanji asks, going on the defensive. Zoro shrugs, then shakes his head, and when he goes to the kitchen, Sanji follows him.

"Usopp called me," Zoro says, and Sanji scowls, wonders if Zoro's going to try to punch him again, because this time he doesn't feel that guilty, and he's not gonna just lie there and take it.  
    
Then Zoro says, sounding utterly confused, "He chewed me out."  
   
Sanji kinda grins to himself, because anyone chewing out Zoro is a pretty grin-worthy occasion, and says, "Get the fuck out of here, I'm making dinner."

He doesn't go to school the rest of the week; there's not much to do at Zoro's apartment, though. He doesn't have a tv, and he doesn't really read, unless weightlifting magazines count. If Sanji didn't know better, he'd think Zoro had a life.  
    
No, wait--Sanji _does_ know better, and yeah, Zoro _doesn't_ have a life.  
   
He bums around town a little, and finds a few odd jobs here and there; people he knows who owe him things; people he wants to know, who _now_ owe him things.

With money in his pocket, he buys some new clothes, then a cellphone. As soon as he switches his number over to the new phone, messages start pouring in.

 _u ok? u weren't in class_ from Tilda. And another one from her, on Thursday: _txt me back pls_

At least a dozen from Zeff, all along the same lines of _get your ass back home if you don't want to be whooped something fierce_  
   
One from Usopp. It just says, _i turned n report_.  
    
And then there's a few from a number he doesn't know, and when he looks at them, he feels a little sick, because they're all something along the lines of: _srry didn't mean 2 piss u of_.

Gin, probably, and how he got Sanji's number, Sanji has no idea.  
    
And, more importantly, why the hell does everyone Sanji know text like a twelve year old girl?

Sanji flips through the messages a few times, and sends a truly apologetic text to Tilda, something like, _sorry i've been sick. see you tomorrow?_  
    
And Zeff, he ignores.  
    
He ignores Usopp's text, too, because that's a can of worms he's not going to open.  
    
Then he calls the new number, and when a man's voice says, "Hello?" he says, "Who the fuck is this?"

There's a pause, then the man's voice says, "Sanji?"

And, yeah, it's Gin alright. Sanji feels something almost like panic, and he tries to lower his voice because Zoro's already home from work, and is lurking somewhere around this ridiculously small apartment.  
    
"Why the fuck did you call me? How did you get my number?"

"I asked your friend," Gin says. "The one with the long nose."  
   
And wow, Sanji feels that like a punch to the gut, because if Sanji could--could do _that_ to Usopp, then he doesn't want to think what Gin could do. Doesn't want to think about Gin almost did to _him_.

"You stay the fuck away from him! Fuck, what the hell is wrong with you?"

"I asked him," Gin repeats, way too calmly. "If I had beat it out of him, I would've said that."

And that really, really pisses Sanji off, but at the same time, he feels a little relieved, because Usopp's a fucking kid, and. And he can't do this. Not right now.  
    
"Don't call me," he says, and before Gin can point that the he was the one who called Gin, he adds, "And don't text me, either. Just leave me the fuck alone."

"I won't," Gin starts to say, like a threat, and Sanji doesn't hear what, exactly Gin won't do, because he hangs up and throws the phone across the room.  
    
It makes a nice dent in the wall, but when it falls to the floor, it's at least in one piece, and he doesn't have to buy _another_ new phone.

He's turning the phone over, looking at the scratches from throwing it, when Zoro comes in and asks, way too abruptly, "What are you doing?"

"Trying to decide what to make for dinner," Sanji says back, and Zoro says, "No. Not that. What are you doing here."

"If you want me to leave," Sanji snaps, "I'm not going to. Fuck, what the hell do you want?"

"If you're in trouble," Zoro says, like Sanji hasn't said a thing, "I don't really care, but don't bring it here." Then he gets a thoughtful look on his face, and will wonders never cease, he must be _thinking_ , and putting two and two together. "Is he the one who hit you with the tire iron?"

Sanji feels his hands go cold. He shoves his phone into his pocket, like it'll hide the evidence. How _stupid_ \-- "I don't know what you're talking about. Fuck, you've got shit for brains."

"I heard you on the phone," Zoro says, and he follows Sanji to the kitchen, and he apparently _doesn't get the hint_ , because he keeps talking, even when Sanji pulls out the biggest cleaver he can find, and lies it _pretty fucking obviously_ on the countertop. "I don't care, but don't get Usopp in trouble."

And that. That's stupid, and it's unfair, and why is everyone always assuming it's _Sanji_ who's at fault?! He turns and, with a red pepper in one hand, a zucchini in the other, yells in Zoro's face. "Why the fuck do you care? God, you fucking asshole, just stay _out of it_ \--"

"Usopp's a good kid," Zoro says, and it sounds like he's repeating someone; Sanji wishes he knew who. Wishes he knew Usopp before all this shit.

"Fuck. Usopp's not a fucking _kid_ anymore," he snaps, and he slams the pepper on the counter. It explodes beneath his hand, and seeds scatter across the counter, drop to the floor like tiny raindrops. "Life's a bitch, isn't it, because he's gonna have to fucking _grow up_."

Zoro's face twitches and he lifts his hand. Makes a fist, then lowers his hand back to his side slowly. "You should leave," he says.

"What, you don't want to hear--to hear that Usopp's not some, some _kid_? He came onto _me_ , he started _everything_. Fuck, I didn't do _anything_ he didn't want." Sanji's ranting at this time; he knows it, and knows it's pissing Zoro off, that it's only a matter of words before they start trying to kill each other. "Why the fuck do you think he's such a fucking _good kid_?!"  
    
"Luffy likes him," Zoro says, so fucking _loyal_ and _dependent_ on Luffy.

"Yeah? Luffy likes me, too," Sanji says, and Zoro says, "Sometimes Luffy's an idiot."  
   
Sanji takes in a breath, holds it. Puts the zucchini down on the counter next to the pepper, then pushes past Zoro. He grabs his stuff, all the shit that's been piling up next to the couch, and shoves as much of it into his bag as he can. He slings in onto his shoulder, and then says the worst curse he can think of.

"I hope you fucking _starve_ ," he screams into the apartment, then he slams the door hard enough that it rebounds, crashing into the wall inside. There's probably a hole the size of the doorknob in the wall now, and from the way Zoro says, "FUCKING HELL, SANJI," Sanji must be right.

He kicks the door again, just for good measure, and the crunching sound of the doorknob breaking an even bigger hole into the wall makes him feel a little better. Then he takes the stairs down four at a time before Zoro can decide to come out and _push_ him down the stairs.

When he gets back to the restaurant, he walks into the kitchen, and is greeted by a chorus of _asshole_ and _fucking brat_ and _Boss, Sanji's back!_

Zeff comes out of the office, holding a cookbook, a finger holding his place, and says, "Eggplant. You're in the dining room tonight."

Sanji hates waiting; hates dragging plates in and out, hates busing when the restaurant is too busy. He grumbles as he goes upstairs to change and to grab his waiting apron, and keeps grumbling in front of Zeff.

He's just come back to the kitchen to get a plate that's _still not done_ , what the fuck, are they all _sleeping back here?!_ when Zeff says, "Sanji. Your friend came by yesterday."  
    
Sanji turns, leans back against the counter and holds onto the edge. "What friend?" he asks.  
    
"The one with the hair." Zeff seems to think, then adds, "And the nose."

"Oh," Sanji says, and then he grabs the last plate and runs from the kitchen's knowing looks.

The weekend passes by on tiptoe. Sanji steals Zeff's car to take Tilda out; she holds his hand when they go to get coffee, and afterwards, she kisses him, and she doesn't bitch about him tasting like cigarettes, or complain when he tries to touch her breasts. Then he drops Zeff's car keys in Zeff's hand when he gets back hours later, and is smacked down to bussing tables.

Then on Sunday, he realizes that it's fucking _final's week_ , and he about has a heart attack, because he nearly flunked out of all his classes last year, and if he doesn't manage to pull his grades up higher this semester, he's fucked, and Zeff will fucking kill him.  
    
He opens up his biology book, looks down at the first page, and then, very sadly, puts his life down as a lost cause.

The week is shitty. Really, really shitty. He goes over as many powerpoints and slides as he can, and he wheedles all the notes he can out of his more delicate classmates.

Tilda invites him over to study, and he actually _does_ study, for all of the thirty minutes before they start making out on her couch. When he goes to the biology final on Thursday, all he can think about is her face and her mouth and the heat of her skin, and he's pretty sure he failed that one.  
   
Then he has his economics final on Friday, and he's pretty sure he looks a little wild-eyed at this point, because Zeff lets him off easy, and everyone else keeps pretty much as far away from him as they can. He tries some last minute studying, then just panics more, and ends up spending the hour before class staring into his closest, wondering if his professor will give him a higher score if he wears a coordinating sweater. And, you know, maybe if he sucks him off under the table.  
   
And that's how he ends up running into the classroom late and realizing, as soon as his ass hits the seat, fuck it all, that he forgot both a scantron _and_ a number two pencil.

"I like your sweater," a girl whispers as the professor explains the test, and Sanji wants to crawl under the table and just die already.  
    
When the professor asks if anyone has any questions, Sanji raises his hand and says, "I forgot a scantron. And a pencil."

There's some laughter around the classroom, but mostly everyone looks pretty sympathetic. The professor, though, just looks at Sanji like no amount of coordinating sweaters and blowjobs will ever right Sanji in his eyes.

"I have an extra scantron," Usopp says from way up in the front, and he passes the scantron back, along with a fucking ugly pencil. Sanji picks up the pencil, all this hideous mottled pea-soup green, and looks at it cautiously.

Sure enough, it says _No. 2_ , and he sits back down, writes his name in the boxes at the top of the scantron.

When he finishes the test, he takes it up, then waits out in the hallway. A few people complain with him good-naturedly, and Sanji complains with them, especially the girls. Then Usopp comes out, looks just as tired and grouchy as everyone else, and Sanji holds out the pencil, says, "Thanks."  
    
"Yeah," Usopp says, and he takes the pencil back, just a little clumsy. He looks at Sanji's face then, and says, "Your face looks better."

"You can come with me, if you want," Sanji says, and he's pretty sure Usopp gets what he's saying, because Usopp gets this nervous look on his face, but he nods, too, short and jerky. Sanji heads off down that long faculty hallway no one ever takes, and Usopp walks with him.

Then he turns down a side hallway, and grabs Usopp, and pins him against the wall, kissing him really, really fucking hard.

Usopp kisses him back, leans into Sanji, and when he licks at Sanji's mouth, Sanji opens his mouth and lies his hands along the plane of Usopp's stomach.

Usopp is wearing of those stupid, tacky hoodies, and Sanji runs his hands along the length of it, then shoves his hands up underneath the hoodie, under the shirt Usopp is wearing underneath, too. Usopp moans against Sanji's mouth and Sanji presses his hands against Usopp's stomach, pets his thumb against the line of hair leading down into Usopp's jeans.  
    
Usopp moans against Sanji's mouth again, then moves his mouth away, starts kissing along Sanji's jawline, moving onto his neck. "Can I?" Usopp asks, and his hands are plucking at Sanji's sweater, the hem of Sanji's jeans. "Can I, will you--"

"Yeah," Sanji says, and he runs a hand along the waistband of Usopp's jeans until his hand is pressed against the hot curve of the small of Usopp's back. His little finger just fits beneath the waistband, just above what has to be Usopp's boxers or briefs, whatever the hell, and when Sanji moves his pinky, Usopp kisses messily at his neck and yanks at Sanji's sweater.  
    
"Careful," Sanji mutters, and he lets his head roll to the side, "you'll stretch it."

Usopp shoves a hand underneath Sanji's sweater, pulling Sanji closer by the waistband of Sanji's jeans, then Usopp is pulling back to say, in a very strained sounding voice, "You're not wearing underwear."

"'course not," Sanji says, a little distracted by the way Usopp's breath stutters each time he pets his thumb down the line of hair on Usopp's stomach. The way the stutter gets more pronounced if Sanji moves his pinky at the same time. "It'd mess up the line of the jeans."  
   
Usopp makes a sound like he's dying, or something, and his eyelids do this weird, girly kinda flutter thing, and Sanji leans forward to suck a very big, very obvious hickey right at the top of Usopp's throat.

Sanji's pretty sure he's gonna be able to get all the way into Usopp's trousers when Usopp suddenly pulls back, his warm hands pulling back from Sanji's skin.

"Wait," Usopp says, and _worst timing ever_. Sanji narrows his eyes, digs in his mental heels, and kisses Usopp on the mouth. Usopp turns his face away and Sanji lets it go, just bites at Usopp's earlobe instead. Usopp's hair is ticking Sanji's face, is tickling Sanji's jaw and collarbone.

"Wait," Usopp says again, then with a most horrified voice, "we're at _school_." Then, just as horrified, "And I have another _final_."

That's when Usopp runs off, yanking his hoodie back down as he skids down the hallway. Sanji watches him go, then sighs, trying to fix his sweater. It's horribly stretched out, just like he was afraid it would be. He yanks it down once more, then gives up, and heads for his professor's office to scare the dickface into giving Sanji and Usopp the A their report deserves.  
   
A few hours later, when he's pretty sure Usopp has to be done with finals, he texts, _going to zoro's apartment, want to come with me? at the quad, meet you there_

 _K_ , Usopp's text says, and Sanji stands in the middle of the quad, tries not to grin too manically, because he keeps remembering the professor's look of utter terror. And the way Usopp had pulled him closer by his waist, and the way Usopp's mouth had gone a little slack when he'd realized Sanji wasn't wearing shit under his jeans.

They catch a bus to Zoro's apartment, and Sanji watches all the other people on the bus. The annoying little kids with their moms, the old lady with the little fold-up shopping cart, the crazy guy who keeps jerking his head to the side and talking to a spot just to the right of the door.  
    
Usopp is fiddling with his phone, texting someone or something, and when he sees Sanji looking, he shuts his phone, then flinches like he just barely realized _how fucking obvious_ that was.

"You text like a fucking girl," Sanji says loudly, and the mothers closest to them look at Sanji with utter loathing. Sanji smiles sweetly at them and says again, just as loudly, "Like a fucking twelve year old."

"Shut up," Usopp hisses. Sanji grins broadly, leans back and spreads his legs wide, until Usopp's thigh is pressed along the whole length of Sanji's.  
    
"Try," he says.  
   
Usopp rolls his eyes and opens his phone again, and when Sanji looks over, Usopp doesn't bother closing the phone; instead, he turns it towards Sanji so Sanji can read it easier.

 _w/ jerkass. wnt b back 4 while. c u 2nite?_  
    
"Like a twelve year old," Sanji repeats, sings it out. "Like a fucking twelve year old girl."

They tumble off the bus a couple blocks from Zoro's apartment, and the whole way they walk there, Usopp just plays with his phone, not really looking at anything else. Sanji looks at his watch a few times, checks the time.  
   
When they get there, Zoro's already gone to work. The apartment's locked, but Sanji didn't grow up on the wrong side of the tracks for shit all.  
    
He picks the lock with the bent paperclips in his pocket and a conveniently placed credit card, then pulls Usopp inside, says, "He's got some good liquor. Whatcha want?"

"Should we--" Usopp starts to protest, and Sanji leans against him, uses his weight on Usopp's to push the door closed. He locks it, too, and Usopp blinks quickly at the sound of the lock sliding home.  
    
"Zoro owes me," Sanji says, and Usopp says, "Okay."

He gets Usopp deliciously drunk--he gets himself deliciously drunk, too. Usopp's a funny, affectionate drunk. He hangs over Sanji, and tells the most outrageous stories, things that can't possibly be true.  
    
"Maybe," Sanji laughs, "in another life," and Usopp says, “Yeah, yeah, in another life, when we were pirates--"

They fuck on Zoro's couch, their jeans pulled down only to their knees, their shirts hiked up to their armpits.

"Like this, like this," Sanji says against Usopp's shoulder-blade, pressing kisses there like Usopp's one of those pretty little girls, all delicate and soft. Usopp's not delicate, though, isn't a girl, so Sanji grabs Usopp's thighs, pulls him back against Sanji until Sanji can slide his dick between Usopp's thighs, where there's just enough--barely enough friction.  
    
"Like this, like this," he says, over and over and on and on, and it's barely enough, not enough, and they're both drunk, he can smell the alcohol on their breath.

"Sanji," Usopp says, "Sanji," then, like it's some kind of miracle, "You're hard," and that's a pretty fucking stupid thing for Usopp to be saying _just now_.

Sanji bites at the knobs of Usopp's spine, sets in his teeth enough that Usopp bleeds, just enough, and when he comes, he presses his sweating forehead against Usopp's back, and takes one long, shuddering, heart-wrenching breath after another.

Then he reaches around and fists Usopp with one hand, reaches between Usopp's thighs to fondle his balls with his other. Usopp whines, sounds like a shot dog, and when Sanji, his hands slick with his own come, says, "Shit, you, you--" Usopp comes all over Zoro's couch.  
    
Usopp kinda just sinks down, so Sanji takes a hold of him, twists their weight around, and carries Usopp down onto the floor. Then Usopp is out like a light, eyes fluttering closed and breath evening out and hands going limp. Such a fucking girl.

Sanji digs into his jeans, finds his flattened pack of cigarettes. He puts one on the edge of his mouth, and it sticks to the dryness of his lip, hangs there as he fishes for his lighter. He lights up and takes a deep breath, then lets it out. When he's finished his second cigarette, he looks over at Usopp, then nudges him with a foot.  
    
"Come on," he says, "we've gotta go."

Usopp's still pretty out of it, sleepy and drunk and so fucking _sated_. Sanji has to pull Usopp's jeans up for him, tuck him all back in; he doesn't really bother wiping Usopp off that much--Usopp's too out of it to even notice, and Zoro's going to be home soon.

He makes himself presentable, too, then grabs Usopp and drags him out of the apartment, not bothering to lock the door.  
    
When they're on the bus, riding back towards their side of town, Sanji gets a text from Zoro  
    
 _YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT I AM GOINGG TO FUCKIING KILL YOU FUCK_

He laughs the rest of the way to Usopp's bus stop.  
    
He drags Usopp off the bus, and by the time they get a few blocks away, Usopp's mostly awake, and getting a little more sober.

"This is it," Usopp says, and Sanji looks at the little house. It's disgustingly cute, more like one of those cottages in those fucking Disney movies he says, very loudly and very fervently (and lying, but fuck anyone who tries to say so), that he fucking hates. Sanji looks at the house then, disbelieving, looks at the mess of a kid Usopp is.  
    
"Here?" he asks. "Really? Fuck."

"Fuck you," Usopp says, but it's warm sounding, like he's saying something else. Sanji feels a shudder at that, and he has to take a step back, and mask it with saying, "Right. Later, then."

"'kay," Usopp says, still the same warm voice, and he drags himself up to the cottage-looking house, with a fucking _porch swing_. Sanji sticks around just long enough to make sure Usopp makes it in, and then he beats it back to the bus stop, to wait for a bus to take him home.  
   
He doesn't go back to Usopp's house. Usopp, though, comes to the restaurant, day after day, and day after day, they stumble upstairs before and after and in the middle of Sanji's shifts, and they fuck on the bed and the floor and just inside the door. Sanji shoves his hands down Usopp's trousers and Usopp's eyelids do that stupid flutter thing, and when they kiss it is with teeth and tongue and the pressing need of time time time.  
   
Then, as fast as things start, a madcap pace, they slow down. They stumble upstairs, and they tumble to the floor, and Usopp just kisses Sanji's neck and fits his hands in Sanji's back pockets, rocks against Sanji like he wants nothing else in the world.

Sanji tries to kiss him harder, and Usopp just kisses him softer, and when Usopp looks at him, he looks like he's in _fucking love_ , and that scares the shit out of Sanji.

"Tell me what you want," Sanji says into Usopp's ear, and Usopp just turns his mouth against Sanji's throat, says, "Nothing."

When Usopp leaves that night, Sanji sits on his floor for a long time, looking at the window. Then he goes and finds Zeff, and says, "I've got to get the fuck out of here."  
   
He heads north in that stupidly old car of his, and in a city there, Sanji wears heavy coat and a spicy cologne and shoes with steel-tipped toes.

He calls in favors, and gets called out, and he beats the shit out of boys and men every night; he gets paid in thick, heavy wads of bills, and he sleeps in the car and in huge apartments and in hotel rooms where he lies his head on the soft, rising breasts of beautiful women.

He leaves his phone in the glove compartment of the car, and when he finally turns it on, nearly three weeks after he left, there are too many messages to read.

 _can i come over?_ the first few from Usopp say. Then they say, _where r u?_ and _answer ur fucking phone._  
   
 _luffy's here,_ Zoro's says. Then, six days later, _luffy went back. he wanted to see u_  
    
And Gin's phone number shows up, too. _still mad?_  
   
He gets drunk that night, absolutely trashed, and when he wakes up, he's sore and confused, lying in a stranger's bed, blood in the corner of his mouth.

He finds his shoes under a chair, and a pair of jeans thrown over the arm of the chair. When he puts them on, he realizes they aren't his. His shirt, when he finds it, is shredded, and his coat is missing. He searches for his keys and his wallet until he hears the front door open, and then he sneaks out a window, slinking down a cold fire escape.

He breaks into the car, hotwires it, and drives out of the city before he pulls over to the side of the road and throws up everything in his stomach.  
    
He gets home two nights later, and when he walks in, just after closing time, Zeff looks at him and asks, "Keys?"

Sanji licks his lips and says, "I lost them."

Zeff nods and goes back to discussing the next week's menu with the soup chef. Sanji takes his shit upstairs, throws it all onto his bed, and then sits at his desk, stretching out his legs until his feet touch the floorboard beneath the desk.  
    
Zeff comes up nearly an hour later, and he knocks at Sanji's door, waits until Sanji says, "What?" before he comes in.  
    
"How'd it go?" Zeff asks. Sanji shrugs, says, "I earned enough to pay for spring semester."  
    
Then he swallows and says, tasting vomit in every word, "I lost it all."  
   
Zeff doesn't say anything to that. Doesn't move, either, just stands there in the doorway until Sanji has to look at him and say, "Zeff, I'm sorry, I didn't--"  
    
"Take the spare tomorrow," Zeff says, "and get another key made."

When Zeff leaves, stumping down the hallway to his room, Sanji leans his head back against the chair back and closes his eyes, and hates this city more than anything in the world.

He goes to get a spare key made the next day, and then he swings by the DMV to get a new license. The line seems to last forever, and he keeps flipping his phone open, then closed. Open, and closed, and open again. He takes two steps forward with everyone else in the line, and waits forever again.  
    
When he's about twenty places higher than when he first came in, he texts Usopp.

 _i was out of town_ , he texts. _got back last night_

Twenty minutes later, his phone is ringing, and he answers it, feeling his palms go sweaty.  
    
"Hello?"  
    
"Sanji?" Usopp sounds furious, as mad as he'd always been when they'd been working on that stupid project last semester. Madder, maybe. Sanji's not that good at figuring things like that out. "Where the fuck are you?"

"DMV," he says. Then, like a stupid explanation, "I lost my license. My wallet, I mean--"  
    
"Where were you?"

"Out of town." He wipes his hand on his jeans, then switches his phone to that hand so he can wipe his other sweaty palm, too. "I had work, I had to--I had to get money. For school."  
    
"What were you doing?"

"I was _working_ \-- Fuck, why are your panties always in such a _knot_ \--" Everyone around him is looking at him now, scowling at him, and he scowls right back, flips them all the finger.  
    
"What were you doing?" Usopp asks again. "I want to know how you got the money."

"Why the-- Why the fuck do you _care_ , it's none of your fucking business. Shit, it was just work."  
    
"Zeff wouldn't tell me."

And oh, shit, Sanji can already feel himself getting hysterical, because this is all fucking insane. Because Usopp looked at him like Sanji fucking _made him happy_ , and Sanji doesn't want to deal with that; doesn't want any of this shit. Doesn't want anyone getting close to Zeff, to the restaurant, to Sanji's _life_.

So he hangs up.  
    
He turns his phone on silent, too, and when the little screen lights up with Usopp's name, he shoves his phone into his pocket.  
   
When he's moved up another twenty people, only six or so from the front, he pulls his phone out, looks at it.  
   
 _call me back_  
    
 _call me back_

Again, and again, one after another, and then they get a little meaner-- as mean as Usopp can get, probably.  
    
 _fucking call me back_  
    
and  
    
 _fuckking call me back u stupd bitch_

And then they stop, right after that one, and Sanji is still thinking _pot calling kettle_ when he gets to the window, and orders a new license.

When he gets back to the restaurant, he gives Zeff both keys for the car and Tibo says, "Your friend is in the dining room."

"Tell him I'm not here," Sanji says, and when Tibo just looks at him like he's crazy, Sanji snaps, "Just fucking _do it_ , god. Fucking hell."

Then he goes to the storage room and looks at all the spices until he's calmed down enough that he won't try to kill anyone.

While he's sitting in there, staring at the huge canister of ground cloves, he pulls out his phone and texts Gin, _no_  
    
 _wat?_

He leans his head against the shelves behind him and sighs. Crosses his legs, then uncrosses them. Stare at his steel-toed shoes, at the flecks of blood that are still sticking to the seams.  
    
 _i'm not mad_ , he finally texts back, and then Gin sends, _that's gud_  
    
Fucking twelve year old girls, Sanji says to himself, and then he goes upstairs and crawls into bed.

Usopp doesn't talk to him again; doesn't call, and doesn't text, and doesn't come by the restaurant.  
   
The spring semester starts, and Sanji doesn't go. Can't come up with that much money in so little time. Instead, he hangs around the restaurant and spends most of his time in the kitchen, moving back and forth between the dining room and the line chefs, standing in for the soup chef on the shitty days the old bastard just decides not to come in.

He's filling in for a waiter the afternoon Gin comes in. He's getting orders for a couple on a date when he looks up and sees Gin's stupid face, and he has to grit his teeth for a moment before he can smile back at the couple.

Then he sees Gin motion towards Sanji, and the host _fucking seats him in Sanji's section_. Sanji seethes as he storms towards the kitchen and thrusts the order pad at Tibo.  
    
"I'm on break," he tells Tibo, and Tibo slowly says, "Okay."

Then Sanji yanks off his apron and tosses it into Zeff's office, and pulls off his nametag so no one will fucking _ask him for water_ or some other stupid shit. Then he runs his hands through his hair, and shakes his head, and tells himself he's acting like a fucking idiot.  
    
"What the hell do you want?" he asks when he gets to Gin's table. Gin looks up at Sanji, then shrugs like an idiot.  
   
Sanji sinks down into the chair with a sigh, resting his arms across the whole table. "Fuck, you're an idiot," he mutters, and Gin says, "Yeah, okay."

Gin orders the cheapest thing on the menu and Sanji doubles the order. Gin keeps looking at Sanji, just staring, and Sanji leans his head on his hand, looks around the dining room.

"You're not mad," Gin says suddenly, and Sanji frowns, says, "Fuck, yeah, of course I'm mad. But I'm not going to beat the shit out of you."

"Okay," Gin says blandly, and when the food comes, bowls of potato dumplings, Gin unwraps his fork and spoon and starts to eat. Sanji eats, too, a few bites, and then he shoves it across the table toward Gin. Gin looks at it, points his fork at it, and Sanji says, "Just fucking eat it already."

Gin is scraping up the last of the second bowl when he asks Sanji, mouth still full (and Zeff would fucking flip if Sanji ever tried that shit, talking with his mouth full), "Want to go get a drink with me?"

Sanji thinks about it for a moment; thinks about the alleyway, the way Sanji had torn his fingernails off on the brick wall. The way Gin had pushed and pushed and fucking _pushed_. Then he thinks about Usopp, and the way Usopp had slipped his hands into Sanji's back pockets, resting against Sanji like he fucking liked Sanji, and so he says, "Yeah, sure."

Gin follows Sanji upstairs when Sanji goes to change. The minute Zeff sees Gin come through the kitchen, Zeff's face goes thunderously black and Sanji has to yell over the racket, "I already beat the shit out of him!"  
    
The kitchen laughs at that, and the clattering goes on as Sanji goes up the stairs, Gin looming right behind him.

When he closes his bedroom door, Gin right next to him, he feels something rise in his stomach, like anticipation.  
    
"Fuck," Gin breathes, "I forgot how many _clothes_ you have."  
   
Sanji snorts and says, "Whatever. Move it."

He goes digging through the piles of clothes for a while, because he knows the shirt he wants is somewhere, but he can't remember where. Then he finds it, a stupidly tight shirt he had worn when Usopp had put his hands in Sanji's back pockets. Then he goes looking for a good pair of jeans, and when he finds one, he drops his slacks, kicks them off.

"You don't wear underwear?" Gin asks curiously, and Sanji says, "It messes up the lines of the jeans."

"Huh," Gin says, like he's not really interested, and Sanji pulls on the pair of jeans, the ones Tilda had liked so fucking much last semester, when he'd made out with her the night before the biology final. They're too tight in all the right places, and he drags on the shirt, flexes his shoulders slowly so the fabric will stretch with his skin, so the seams won't tear. He probably looks like a slutty fag, he thinks. He doesn't really care.

He keeps digging, and then he finds one of Usopp's hoodies, left in Sanji's room in the beginning of winter, and he drags it on so Zeff won't look at him so fucking disapprovingly when he leaves.  
    
He toes on a pair of hightops, a hideous orange, and then he says, "Fine, let's go."  
   
"It takes you a long time," Gin says, "to look like shit."  
   
Sanji has to think about that for a moment, try to figure out if it's a compliment or not. He can't quite figure it out, and he doesn't think Gin knows, either, so he shrugs, grabs his keys and the new wallet he bought a few weeks ago; it's still empty, only a license and nothing else (and sometimes, when he opens it, he wonders if he'll get another school ID. if he'll ever bother going back).

Gin buys him drink after drink, shots and mixed drinks and then straight vodka that burns its way through Sanji's blood. Sanji grows looser, happier, and he bitches at Gin fondly, and when Gin laughs, he laughs, too.

"I'm drunk," he tells Gin when he's way past drunk. "I'm drunk, and I'm all fucked up, and, and. And."  
    
Gin smiles at him, but he doesn't put his hands in Sanji's pockets, so when Gin says, "Wanna fuck, then?" Sanji says, "Yeah."

They fuck in the alleyway because Gin's place is off limits and Sanji can't take Gin back to the restaurant. Gin pulls Usopp's hoodie up, then drags Sanji's jeans down, and he sucks Sanji off in the alleyway, down on his knees like a fucking whore. Sanji looks down at him, drunk and blurry, and says, "Too bad you don't have tits."

Gin laughs at him, licks him and sucks him until he comes, and when Sanji's leaning back against the alley wall, Gin says, "You're a fucking weird kid."  
    
"Yeah," Sanji says, "yeah, I'm a fucking kid, and, and. And."

And he kisses Gin, tastes himself, bitter and salty, in Gin's mouth. When Gin takes Sanji's hand, moves it down to the front of his jeans, Sanji complies, does what Gin wants. Pulls Gin off and then, when Gin pushes Sanji's hand back towards Sanji's mouth, licks Gin's come off his fingers.  
    
Then he says, "I'm going home."

"Right," Gin says, and he walks back to the restaurant with Sanji, his arm looped over Sanji's shoulder. It's too hot and heavy; Sanji wants to shake it off. He doesn't, though, just keeps walking, watching the sidewalk weave beneath his every footfall.  
    
"Cracks," he says, and when Gin makes a questioning noise, Sanji says, "Break your back. Or neck. I could break your neck."  
    
"I know," Gin says, and Sanji says, "Good."

Gin leaves him two doors down from the restaurant, and Sanji staggers in through the front, bumping into a table as he tries to get through the dark dining room.  
    
When he gets to the kitchen, he sees a light under Zeff's door, and so he says loudly, "I'm home, Zeff."  
    
After a moment, Zeff's voice says, "You're late, Eggplant." Then, a little quieter, "Goodnight."

Sanji strips down in his room, taking off Tilda's favorite jeans, his favorite shirt; Usopp's forgotten hoodie. Then he wonders if he can strip off his skin, too, and everything else, his hair and his eyes and his tongue, take everything off until there's nothing keeping him all together anymore. Then he says, very quietly, "I'm drunk," and he crawls into bed, naked and cold and with skin too sensitive for the crisp drag and pull of the bedsheets.

x

Their soup chef dies in the midst of February, an angry old man dying an angry old death. The kitchen buzzes with the news, that the chef had been cursing out the paramedics as he died, a heart attack or a stroke or something else; it's the sick, dark humor they always have when one of their old men dies, and Sanji laughs with them, a chuckle that sounds like the rasping of the soup chef's cough when he'd been alive.

He didn't have a family, so it's Zeff and Sanji who go to empty out his apartment, a shitty little rathole on the side of the train tracks. There are photo albums and yellowed record-sleeves and newspapers tacked up along the walls. A drawer in the kitchen is filled with heavy recipe cards, covered in a scrawled penhand, and Sanji flips through them, then slides them into his pocket.  
    
"You'll cover his post," Zeff says as they sort through all the shit, what they'll toss and what they'll keep and what they'll give to everyone else in the kitchen.

"Fucking hate soup," Sanji mutters, and he takes down all the old newspaper clippings, folds them and tucks them into the back of an old photo album. The album will probably go into Zeff's closet; Zeff has a lot of photographs, Sanji knows, from people Sanji never met, and people Sanji wishes he had never met.

The next day, true to his word, Zeff nods Sanji towards the stovetop the soup chef had always grumbled away over, and Sanji drags himself over, grumbles as darkly as the soup chef had always grumbled.  
    
"Don't fuck it up," Patty advices Sanji, and Sanji stirs the soup a little faster.

"I've been doing this for years, fucker," Sanji snaps, and every time Zeff comes by, like he thinks Sanji has suddenly become _incompetent_ , Sanji seethes inside.

A week goes by, and another, and it's like Sanji has always been the soup chef. He doesn't touch the lines anymore, never gets thrown out into the dining area. Everyone stays out of his way, and becomes a little more deferential, and sometimes, Zeff comes and asks Sanji his opinion on the menu, on the lists of produce and spices to order from their vendors.

It is becoming, Sanji realizes, a little more his restaurant.

Gin comes by sometimes; after the first few times, he figures out that Sanji can't just fuck off during his shifts anymore, and then Gin starts coming later, at eleven or so, when the restaurant is closing down.

"Want to get a drink?" Gin asks every time, like Sanji doesn't get it, and every time, Sanji says, "Come on, then."  
   
He drags Gin upstairs, and Gin sits on Sanji's chair or desk or bed, and watches as Sanji strips down, then dresses again, in ratty jeans and worn out shirts and everything else that makes him look as fucked as Gin.  
    
Gin laughs, digs through Sanji's clothes, and throws silk vests and embroidered shirts onto the bed, asking, “Where the fuck do you get all these clothes?"

"Where the fuck do you think?" Sanji snips back, and he pulls on his shoes, always the orange hightops, and goes out with Gin, where he drinks too much and smokes too much and fucks too much, tired and angry and waiting for the spring to end.  
    
And it doesn't. It goes on, and on, and on, and Gin hands him drink after drink, watches Sanji smoke cigarette after cigarette.

"My boss," Gin says, "is going to fuck up the restaurant."

He says it like a warning, or something; like goodwill, maybe. Sanji reaches out, stamps the end of his cigarette into the back of Gin's hand, and Gin grabs the side of Sanji's head, cracks it against the wall.  
   
They fight as much as they fuck, bitch over this and that and the other. Sanji comes home with bloody in his mouth and bruised shoulders, and Gin winces when he breathes, like he's got more than cracked ribs.

"Why the fuck are you sticking around?" Sanji asks curiously when Gin is nursing his burnt hand, sucking at the blistering skin. Gin looks at him with narrowed eyes, then lifts his mouth, licks the blisters again.

"Fuck if I know," he says, and Sanji drags him close, kisses him with tongue, his cigarette dangling from his fingertips.

"You look like shit," Tibo says in April, when Sanji can barely drag himself up and down the stairs. He's fucking sick of this spring, is sick of the restaurant and Gin and _soup_ , always fucking soup in the back of his head. It's a fucking sad life, and he doesn't want it--doesn't _want_ to want it.

He flips Tibo off, then turns on the burner beneath the huge pot; sinks down onto his heels so he can see the flames of the burner, then stays down there, resting his forehead against the metal frame of the stovetop. He can feel it heating against his skin, and he's beginning to sweat.  
    
"I fucking hate soup," he announces at large, and then he stands up, and pulls off his apron, and walks out of the kitchen.

He walks halfway to the Zoro's apartment, then gives up and rides a bus the rest of the way. He kicks up his feet, presses them against the back of the seat in front of him, and when someone sits there, a punk of a kid, Sanji flexes his legs, pushes his feet against the seat until the back is bowing inwards. The punk kid looks back at him, says, "What the hell, man?"  
    
Sanji grins at him, then leans his head back and closes his eyes.

He misses Zoro's stop by three, and has to backtrack until he sees a coffee shop he knows, an old pawn shop. When he finally gets to Zoro's apartment, he knocks, then sits on the ugly welcome mat in front of the door to wait.

It's hours before Zoro comes home, and Sanji's ass has gone numb, and he's torn the ugly welcome mat to shreds. Zoro looks down at him, and Sanji brushes the ugly threads off his hands, says, "Let me the fuck in already."

When he goes in, he smirks at Zoro's couch, then sits on the arm of it, kicks his heels against the base of the couch.

"What do you want?" Zoro asks, and Sanji rolls his eyes, says, "Don't want shit from you."

"Yeah? It's been a while." Zoro pointedly looks at his couch, then looks at Sanji, and Sanji can only grin back, still feeling unrepentant.  
    
"I've been busy," Sanji says, and he only feels his grin fade when Zoro says, "Usopp said you're not in school."

"I'm working." Sanji stretches out his legs, looks at his feet, then picks at a dried stain on his old jeans.

"Yeah?" Zoro shoves him over, right onto the spot where Sanji is pretty sure Usopp had come, months ago, and Sanji sighs, leans back against the couch. Whatever. "Luffy was pretty upset he missed you. He wanted you to meet his friend, this girl he met at school."

Sanji straightens up a little, just a little, and asks, "What was her name?"  
    
"Nami, or something?" Zoro frowns at nothing in particular, scratches at his arm. "She's studying geology or something. I dunno."  
    
"Nami?" Sanji closes his eyes, says it again. "Nami. That's a nice name. What'd she look like?"

"Tits, legs, hair," Zoro says, and Sanji pretty much wants to punch him in the head, because he has no idea how Zoro can be so stupid.

"You're an idiot," he snaps, and then he shoves Zoro off the arm of the couch and steps on him on his way to the kitchen. There's not much there, but the spices they bought last year are still there, thrown into the back of a cupboard. Sanji pulls them out, then digs around until he finds a few eggs and some potatoes.

"Have you talked to Usopp?" he asks when he's dicing the potatoes, the eggs already boiling on the stove. Zoro heaves a sigh, like Sanji asked Zoro to perform all the labors of the world.  
    
"Not for a few days. What are you making?"  
    
Zoro tries to stick a finger into the pot and Sanji turns, smacks it with the flat of the knife.

"Nothing for you," he barks. "Get your fucking finger out of the fucking pot."

"I can't figure out why anyone likes you," Zoro grouses, and Sanji thinks about Gin, and Usopp, and Luffy, and Tilda, and even Zeff, and says, "Yeah, me neither."

They eat potato salad and the ends of bread, and Sanji leans across, shakes salt and pepper and a little basil onto Zoro's plate.

"Fucking baby," he mutters, and Zoro just stabs at a cube of potato, shoves it into his mouth. He chews noisily and Sanji makes a face at him; eats his own cubes with fork and knife turned at forty-five degrees.

When Zoro's scraped his plate clean, and has eaten the rest of Sanji's plate, too, Sanji leans back and balances on the legs of his chair, says, "How have things been?"

Zoro gives him a long, stupid look, then says, "Fine."

"Right. Whatever." Sanji sits forward, lets the front legs of the chair crash against the cheap kitchen floor. "Fuck. Forget this, I'm going."

When he reaches the bus stop, he digs out his cellphone and scrolls through Zeff's texts. Then he finds the newest one from Gin, and he replies, texts, _what's your address_

He's still waiting for the bus half an hour later when he gets a text back

_57 nd pine_

It's an old brick apartment, tall and spindly, lights shining out of windows on every side. Sanji looks up at it, then calls Gin, asks as soon as Gin answers, "Which apartment, fucker?"

7B, at the top of the building. Sanji takes the first three flights at a jog, then slows to a walk. He has to stop on the sixth flight, out of breath and feeling flushed; he takes a few deep, heavy breaths, and tries to slow his breathing, because fuck if he's going to show up at Gin's apartment already out of breath. He takes the last flight slowly, one step at a time, and by the time he's standing in front of Gin's door, his breathing is slow and his heart beat isn't as frantic.

He looks at the tarnished 7 and B, then knocks on the door; it's solid wood, heavy and thick, and the sound of his knuckles against the wood sounds low, like a bass. He waits, then is about to knock again when he hears a deadbolt slide back, then a lock turn. Gin opens the door a few inches, looks at Sanji, then opens the door wider, says, "Come on, then."

The apartment's cluttered; there's way too much furniture, mismatched chairs and loveseats and a sofa with fraying arms. The coffee tables are all covered with cups and mugs and stacks of mail, and there are old framed photographs on the walls that would look better in an old woman's place.

Sanji looks around, then says, more honestly than he wants to admit, "Nice place."

"Yeah?" Gin asks, and then, like Sanji had pushed Usopp against Zoro's door months and months ago, he pushes Sanji up against the door, putting one hand against Sanji's side and sliding the deadbolt in with the other. Sanji turns his head against the door, listens to the sound of the locks echoing through the thick wood.

"Yeah," he says, and he licks his lips, says, "You wanna fuck me? Fuck me like a dog, put your dick up my ass--"

"I have a job," Gin interrupts. "Tonight."

"Now?" Sanji asks. He looks down at his wrist, where he used to wear a watch, before he got thrown into the kitchen to stay.  
    
"In a few minutes."

Then Sanji looks around the apartment again, and sees the dismantled revolver, the neat stacks of bullets next to a table leg. He blinks, rests the curve of his head against the door, and says, "Who are you killing?"

"Some guy, his wife." Gin's body is still pressed up against Sanji's, and his breath is whiffling out over Sanji's ear. Gin's lips, when Sanji looks, are chapped, and his face is close enough that Sanji can see old scars from pimples and nicks from shaving. "Shouldn't take long."

"Going home," Sanji says, and Gin says, "Stay. You can sleep in my bed."

And he does. He sits on the edge of one of the coffee tables, the table low enough that his knees touch his chin. He watches Gin put together the gun; no silencer.  
    
"Don't open the door," Gin says, "and don't answer the phone."

"Yeah, whatever, fuck. Are you my mom or something?" Sanji leans back on his hands, kicks out his legs as far as he can. The heels of his shoes dig into the thin carpet, and the toes are rubbing up against the underside of a coffee table. He twists his ankle to the right, then pulls his legs back. The toes of his shoes are scuffed.

Gin doesn't say anything, just sorta grunts and shoves the gun down the pack of his jeans, like a fucking punk. Hoodlum. Zeff, Sanji thinks, would be having a heart attack right about now, if he thought--if he _knew_ \--

Gin stops at the doorway, looks back at Sanji for a long time. Sanji feels the muscles in the back of his neck tightening, his shoulders trying to hunch up. He scowls, at Gin and the coffee tables and the old-lady pictures on the wall. "What?" he asks, feeling defensive.

"If someone comes by," Gin says, like Sanji's _seven years old and can't remember shit_.  
    
" _Fuck_ ," he yells, "I _know_ , so get the fuck _out_ \--"

Gin locks the door behind him; Sanji watches the lock on the doorknob turn. Then he gets up, and goes over, and throws the deadbolt, too.  
    
Then he turns around, scuffs his foot across the carpet, and looks.

"Nice place," he mutters under his breath, and means it.  
   
He strips down, piece by piece. Drops his shirt on the yellow loveseat, and kicks off his shoes right before the edge of the linoleum. He pads, barefoot, through Gin's kitchen, running his finger across the counter. It's cluttered, but clean enough-- no roaches, or any shit like that. He opens the fridge, then looks through the cupboards. Then he drops his trousers, leaves them in a pile under the flickering light.  
   
He doesn't turn on the bedroom light. Just squints, then closes his eyes. Counts to ten, like Zeff taught him when he first moved into the restaurant; when he couldn't find the bathroom in the long, dark hallway upstairs. He opens his eyes, and squints again. Stumbles against the bed, and reaches out, runs his hands along it.  
    
He crawls into the bed, shudders against the feel of a stranger's sheets on his skin. Rubs his face against the fitted sheet, then grabs a pillow, pulls it down to his face. He presses it against his mouth and nose, tight enough that when he tries to breathe, he can't; tighter, tighter, and then he lets go, takes a breath. He can smell Gin; he thinks it's Gin, probably Gin. It smells like sweat and some nasty chemically shampoo and gunpowder, maybe a little blood. Like a man, too, probably. Maybe a little like Usopp used to smell after they'd fucked, sweaty and sated and leaning against Sanji like he couldn't stay standing.  
    
He rolls onto his back, kicks all the blankets and sheets off the bed. Spreads out, his feet and hands touching each corner of the bed. He stares up at the ceiling, where the faint, flickering light from the kitchen is throwing weird shadows.

He makes up stories for them; sees a girl in that shadow, and that one, too. Like the--the muses, or mermaids, or whatever the shit it was, that he learned about back in high school. Girls singing in the water, or some shit.

He falls asleep like that, naked and spread on Gin's bed, his palms turned upwards, his hair spread out on the pillow. He wakes up curled in a ball, skin clammy and cold and his left leg asleep. The bedroom light is on, and Gin's standing by the bed, saying, "What the hell, why'd you leave your clothes everywhere?"

"I couldn't find the air conditioning," Sanji lies, and he rubs his check against his wrist, rolls over enough so he can get the blood flowing to his left leg again. Pins and needles prick through his foot, knives through his ankle, and he grimaces, asks, "What time is it?"

"Two, two-thirty." Gin's pulling off his jacket, throwing it onto a chair in the corner. He tosses his shirt there, too, then turns, says, "I'm taking a shower. Pick your stuff up."

He doesn't. He goes and stands in the kitchen for a while, dusty-feeling linoleum under his feet. Then he goes to the bathroom, jiggles the handle until the door pops open. Shoves the shit on the counter into the sink, razor and shaving cream and one of those dinky combs from the dollar store; he sits there, and leans back against the fogged up mirror.

"How'd it go?" he asks over the sound of the water. A second later, Gin tears back the shower curtain and leans out, looking at Sanji with a weird, kinda wild look.  
    
"The fuck?" Gin asks, and Sanji repeats, slowly peeling his shoulders from the mirror, "How'd it go?"

There's shampoo in Gin's hair, sliding down onto his face, and Gin pushes it back with a hand. A few of the suds fly, fall to the bathroom floor. One of them floats for a minute, then pops against the shower curtain.  
    
"Fine," Gin says. "They were home, in bed. It was easy."

"Did she scream?"

Gin pushes the shower curtain further back, leans his hand against the wall. He's dripping water all over the floor now, and Sanji watches it; watches the shampoo slide down the length of Gin's neck. "Yeah."  
    
"A lot?"  
    
"Yeah."  
    
"'kay." Sanji leans back against the mirror again, says, "You're getting water everywhere."

Gin leaves the shower curtain open, and Sanji watches him shower. He puts his whole head under the showerhead when he washes his hair, squeezes his eyes shut like a little kid. The shampoo must still get in, though, because he curses, rubs at his right eye with a fist. Then he soaps down his body, and picks at his hands.

"Do you get blood," Sanji asks, "under your fingernails?"

"Mhmm," Gin hums, and Sanji says, "Me, too."

"It's a bitch," Gin says, and Sanji says, "Yeah."  
    
When Gin gets out, he drips all over everything; the floor, the mats, and Sanji's legs. He puts his hands on either side of Sanji's waist and leans in like he's blind, like he can't see Sanji. Sanji leans back, the full line of his back presses against the mirror, and the shock of the coolness against his skin makes him take in a breath, sharp and little.  
    
"I'm gonna fuck you," Gin says, "up the ass."  
    
"'kay," Sanji says, then, when Gin puts his hands on his thighs, bitches, "You're still wet."

"I don't have any," Gin says, and Sanji says, "What, towels?"

When Gin gives him a really stupid look, Sanji feels something like overwhelming despair, and says, "God, you're a fucking loser, aren't you?"  
    
That's when Gin grabs Sanji, one hand on Sanji's knee, the other wrapping around Sanji's wrist. He yanks, pulling Sanji off the counter, and Sanji yelps as he goes. He reaches back, grabbing for something, and feels a fingernail bend back and snap as he claws for purchase on the faucet.

" _Fuck_!" he screams in Gin's face, and Gin's face goes really still. "What the _fuck_ , you _fucker_ \--"

"You came here," Gin says, and Sanji hears, _he came onto me_ and _he never said no_. "You slept in _my bed_."

"Fine," Sanji spits, and he sucks his finger into his mouth. The blood is bitter on his tongue, and he bites his teeth down on the nail and rips it the rest of the way off his finger. The blood explodes in his mouth, and the feel of his tongue on the nailbed makes the pit of his stomach drop out in pain. "Fucking _fine_ ," he snarls around his finger.

Gin grabs Sanji's hand, pulls Sanji's finger from his mouth, and the edge of Sanji's teeth trail over the nailbed. Sanji clenches his eyes shut, bites back a groan of pain and a wave of nausea. Fuck, a fucking _fingernail_ , like a--like a _girl_.

"Sometimes," Gin says, and when Sanji cracks open his eyes, Gin is just looking at Sanji's stupid _finger_ , "you really fucking piss me off."

Sanji feels so--so angry, so fucking _angry_ , and he wants to beat the shit out of Gin. Wants to storm out.  
    
And, he realizes, he has nowhere else to go.

He bites it back, pain and anger and the rising vomit in the back of his throat, and he leans his hips against the counter, sets his chin down against his chest. Holds his breath as he counts (he only gets to three, can't get any further), and says, voice feeling harsh in his own mouth, "What the fuck do you want, then?"

"I wanna go to bed," Gin says. "I've got work in the morning." He lets go of Sanji's hand, takes a step back. "Don't bleed all over my sheets."

He wraps a tissue around his finger, then another, and shoves the ends under the bulk of the tissue. He sits in the middle of Gin's bed, crosslegged, clutching the base of his finger tightly, like it will cut off the pain, and watches as Gin digs through the closet for an old, bleached towel.

Gin rubs at his hair roughly, and Sanji winces as he thinks about all the split ends and broken hair. Gin rubs at the rest of his body just as roughly, and when he tosses the towel toward the kitchen, his skin looks raw and red. Sanji hopes it hurts, hopes it feels like the scrape of bricks against Gin's skin.  
    
"Shove over," Gin says, and Sanji says, "Fuck you," and scoots over about three inches.  
    
They sleep like that, Sanji crowding up as much of the bed as he can, Gin on the edge. When Sanji wakes up in the morning, he's still near the center of the bed, and Gin's balancing on the edge of the bed, a leg and arm hanging down onto the floor. Sanji thinks about pushing him, then rolls over instead, scooting to the other side of the bed and dragging the blankets with him.

He falls back asleep, digging his cheek into the cool side of a pillow, feet tucked up into a warm pocket of blankets.  
   
When he wakes up, Gin is pressed up against his back, hot and hard and pressing his wet mouth against the back of Sanji's neck.

"Still pissed?" Gin asks, and Sanji stretches his feet, feels his toes slip against warm sheets.

"Yeah," he says, then hedges, "not really."

"Good." Gin bites at the top of Sanji's spine, hard enough that Sanji's pretty sure he's going to fucking _bleed_ , and says, "You'll have to leave soon."

"Yeah, okay," Sanji says, a little distracted, because Gin's hand is fondling Sanji's balls, and his thumb is rubbing little circles on the taut stretch of skin between Sanji's balls and the pucker of his ass. "Fuck."  
    
"Yeah--" Gin bites at his spine _again_ , then pulls his hands back, presses them against Sanji's back, and _pushes Sanji out of the fucking bed_.

"Krieg's going to be here soon," Gin says, like that's a reasonable excuse for _shoving Sanji out of the bed_. "So you better go." Then, totally not subtly, the fucking moron, "Like now."

He barely gives Sanji enough time to put on his trousers before he kicks Sanji out. Sanji fumes as he takes the six flights of stairs down, pulling on his shirt and hopping on the fourth landing to ties his shoelaces. Then, when he gets to the bottom, he sees a big, shiny black car turn the corner, the kind of car the fucking mafia uses, and he turns and fucking runs the other way, ducking into the first alleyway he reaches.

He sprints down the alleyway, then turns the corner and slows to a little less obvious jog. He cuts across the street, flipping off a car that nearly runs him down, and takes another alleyway. Then backtracks a little, and slows to a walk. Stops to look in a cafe window, and to look behind him.  
    
And, when no car pulls up behind him, and no one looms over him with a fucking tire iron, he smooths the line of his trousers, then shoves his hands in his pockets and starts on home.

Gin's apartment is on the other side of the university. That is why, Sanji is later sure, he has the shitty luck of running into Usopp on the street.  
   
As soon as he sees him, he realizes that he didn't get to brush his teeth, that his fingernail is still wrapped in bloody tissues, and that he can feel his shirt pull on the fucking _bloody_ bites Gin left on his neck.  
    
Sanji shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, narrows his eyes against the morning sun, and walks as straight as he can.

And, predictably, so fucking predictably, fails miserably.  
    
He bumps shoulders with Usopp, and when Usopp really _looks_ at him, Usopp's mouth twists like he's about to smile, and his eyes narrow like he's about to bitch Sanji out for something.  
    
"Sanji," Usopp says, and then, fucking worst greeting ever, "You look like shit."

"Yeah?" Sanji looks down at himself; at his tattered, grease-stained jeans, at his shirt that has splotches of yesterday's soup near the hem. At the scuffed toes of his steel-toed shoes, the ones that still have blood in the seams. He looks back up, and then looks over Usopp's shoulder, at the far end of the street, and he smiles, says, "Yeah, well. Life's a bitch."

Usopp clears his throat, then says, "You didn't come back to school."

"I didn't have the money."

"I thought--" Usopp blinks his stupid, round eyes too fast, like the sun is too bright, or like maybe he's going to fucking cry, like he still fucking _cares_. "I thought you were working over the winter break."

"I was," Sanji says, the words short and broken in his mouth. He grits his teeth, frowns at nothing in particular. "You should probably--" He waves a hand vaguely toward campus, and Usopp nods, takes an awkward step toward Sanji.

"Yeah," Usopp says, and, "It was good. Seeing you."

"Yeah," Sanji repeats after him, and sidles to the side, avoiding Usopp's hand. Usopp stops, looks even more stupid and awkward.  
    
"Maybe," Usopp says, like he's really trying, "we could, sometime."

Sanji thinks about Usopp's stupid smile and the way he'd rocked against Sanji, the way they'd bickered on the bus and how Usopp had kissed him in the faculty hallway in the business building; says, "No, we couldn't."

Usopp's face is real, and it looks so ugly when he's hurt, like Sanji just kicked him in the ribs. Sanji fists his hands in his pockets, feels the tissues wrapped around his finger pull away from the crusty scabs. It hurts, feels like someone's shoving splinters beneath his fingernails.

"It's not," he says, "that big a deal--" He stops, blows out a breath, trying to blow his hair out of his face. "Fuck, you're always such a--"

"Such a what?" Usopp asks, his ugly face getting mean. Sanji takes a wise step back, because he doesn't want to get into a fucking _brawl_ on top of everything else.

"A fucking _drama queen_ ," Sanji hisses, because it's the late morning commute, the college kids and yuppies passing by with coffee in styrofoam cups, their eyes looking over Sanji and Usopp like they know _everything_. "I was fucking you, and now I'm fucking someone else. It's not a big fucking deal."

Usopp doesn't say anything. Doesn't try to swing at Sanji, either. He just shoves past Sanji, storming into the rush of the late commute. Sanji turns and watches him go, and when Usopp crosses the street, turning the corner up to the campus, Sanji blows his hair up off his forehead and turns to go home, a sick feeling in his stomach.

He comes in through the kitchen door, and Carne sees him, says, "Where the fuck have you been?!"  
    
"Off being a fag," he snaps, "with my punk of a boyfriend."  
    
Then sees Zeff's office door swing open.

Sanji looks at Carne's look of frozen horror, then looks at Zeff's door, then turns and walks back out the door.  
    
"My life," he says to the world at large, when he's sitting in the fucking park, on a fucking bench, surrounding by fucking pigeons, his teeth still unbrushed and his hair greasy and flat, "fucking sucks."

He's still sitting in the park, surrounded by diseased pigeons and candy wrappers, when Gin texts.

_u can cum back_

Sanji chokes on his own breath when he laughs, and it takes him a long, long time to stop coughing. Fucking air. He lights up a new cigarette, and pulls in a drag. A cough, and he watches the smoke spread out from his mouth.

 _you text like a fucking moron_ , he texts back after he’s finished his cigarette. He’s thinking about lighting up a new one when his phone goes off, shrill and vibrating.

 _u coming??_ Gin's text says, and Sanji rolls his eyes, scuffs his heels against the ground.

He thinks about it for a while. Thinks about Gin (probably still sitting around shirtless, the fucking moron), and about walking all the way back. Then he leans his head back on the bench, the nape of his neck pressed against the rigid wooden back of the bench. It's painful.  
    
 _no_ , he texts, _i've got shit to do_. And he does.

Carne's still in the kitchen when he gets there, cursing over the fucking soup, face going darker each time he dips the ladle in, then lifts it out. Dips, and lifts, and curses.  
    
"Fucking soup," Carne curses, and Sanji, feeling a sense of really mean, petty glee, says, "Yeah, fucking soup. Fucking sucks."

Carne gives Sanji a really dark look, something between rage and just pure hate, and Sanji gives him one back.

"You're fucking up the soup," Sanji says, and Carne throws the ladle into the pot of soup, boiling broth splashing up the pot's metal sides.  
    
"Zeff," Carne yells, "the fucking kid's back!"  
    
And Zeff yells, "Fix the fucking soup, Sanji!"  
   
And Sanji yells, "Stop yelling, _fuck_!"


End file.
